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GUESSES AT THE KIDDLE 

OP EXISTENCE 



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GUESSES AT 

THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 

AND 

OTHER ESSAYS ON KINDRED SUBJECTS 



BY 

GOLDWIN SMITH, D.C.L. 

Author of "Canada and the Canadian Question," "The 

United States," "Essays on Questions 

OF THE Day," etc., etc. 






THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

LONDON : MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd. 
1897 

All rights reserved 



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COPTEIGHT, 1896, 

By the MACMILLAN COMPANY. 



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NcrtoootJ ^rega 

J. S. Gushing & Co. — Berwick & Smith 
Norwood Mass. U.S.A. 



PREFACE 

Of the papers in this volume three have 
appeared before ; two in the North Amerioan 
Review^ one in the Forum^ to the editors of 
which, respectively, the writer's thanks are 
due for their courtesy in permitting the repub- 
lication. The writer has also once or twice 
drawn on previous papers of his own. 

For such of the essays as have appeared in 
print some inquiries have been made. Those 
who desire to read them again are probably 
of the same mind as the writer, and with him 
believe that there is no longer any use in 
clinging to the untenable or in shutting our 
eyes to that which cannot be honestly denied. 
The educated world, and to a great extent the ^ 
uneducated world also, has got beyond thev 
point at which frank dealing with a tradi- ^ 
tional creed can be regarded as a wanton dis- ' 
turbance of faith. 



Vi PREFACE 

Liberal theologians have at least half re- 
signed the belief in miracles, rationalizing 
wherever they can and minimizing where that 
process fails. Liberal theologians, and even 
theologians by no means ranked as liberal, if 
they are learned and open-minded, have given 
up the authenticity and authority of Genesis. 
With these they must apparently give up the 
Fall, the Redemption, and the Incarnation. 
After this, little is left of the ecclesiastical 
creeds for criticism to destroy. 

If there is anything which, amidst all these 
doubts and perplexities, our nature tells us, it 
is that our salvation must lie in our uncom- 
promising allegiance to the truth. It is hoped 
that nothing in these pages will be found fairly 
open to the charge of irreverence or of want of 
tenderness in dealing with the creed which is 
still that of men who are the salt of the earth. 

If much is, for the present, lost, let us re- 
member that there is also much from which by 
the abandonment of dogmatic tradition we are 
relieved. If, on the one hand, the old argu- 
ments for theism and immortality have failed 
us, and the face of the Father in heaven is for 



PREFACE VU 

the moment veiled, on the other hand we are 
set free from the belief that all who go not in 
by the strait gate, that is, the greater part of 
mankind, are lost for ever ; from belief in the 
God of Dante, with his everlasting torture- 
house ; from belief in the God of Predestina- 
tion, who arbitrarily rejects half his creatures 
and dooms them to eternal fire. That which 
in a good sermon has most practical effect will 
probably survive its ecclesiastical or theological 
form. 

The spirit in which these pages are penned is 
not that of Agnosticism, if Agnosticism imports 
despair of spiritual truth, but that of free and 
hopeful inquiry, the way for which it is neces- 
sary to clear by removing the wreck of that 
upon which we can found our faith no more. 

To resign untenable arguments for a belief 
is not to resign the belief, while a belief bound 
up with untenable arguments will share their 
fate. 

Where the conclusions are, or seem to be, 
negative, no one will rejoice more than the 
writer to see the more welcome view reasserted 
and fresh evidence of its truth supplied. 



VIU PREFACE 

If, as our hearts tell us, there is a Supreme 
Being, he cares for us ; he knows our perplex- 
ities ; he has his plan. If we seek truth, he 
will enable us in due time to find it. Whether 
we find it cannot matter to him; it may con- 
ceivably matter to him whether we seek it. 

The reader will look for no attempt to dis- 
cuss recondite questions, documentary or his- 
torical. Nothing is attempted here beyond the 
presentation of a plain case for a practical pur- 
pose to the ordinary reader. 

It may be thought presumptuous in a layman 
to write on these subjects, though his interest 
in them is as great as that of the clergy. 
Would that the clergy could write with per- 
fect freedom. 

Toronto, January, 1897. 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OP EXISTENCE . . 1 

THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT . . 47 

IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE? 97 

THE MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY . 135 

MORALITY AND THEISM 189 

ix 



GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF 
EXISTENCE 



GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF 
EXISTENCE 

Never before has the intellect of man been 
brought so directly face to face with the mys- 
tery of existence as it is now. Some veil of 
religious tradition has always been interposed. 
At the beginning of this century most minds 
still rested in the Mosaic cosmogony and the 
Noachic deluge. Greek speculation was free, ? 
and its freedom makes it an object of extreme 
interest to us at the present time. But it was 
not intensely serious ; it was rather the intel- 
lectual amusement of a summer day in Academe 
beneath the whispering plane. 

No one who reads and thinks freely can 
doubt that the cosmogonical and historical 
foundations of traditional belief have been 
sapped by science and criticism. When the « 
crust shall fall in appears to be a question of ! 
time, and the moment can hardly fail to be one 
3 



4 GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 

I i of peril ; not least in the United States, where 

I i education is general and opinion spreads rapidly 

I I over a level field, with no barriers to arrest its 
f? sweep. 

Ominous symptoms already appear. Almost 
all the churches are troubled with heterodoxy 
and are trying clergymen for heresy. Quite as 
significant seems the growing tendency of the 
pulpit to concern itself less with religious 
dogma and more with the estate of man in 
his present world. It is needless to say what 
voices of unbelief outside the churches are heard 
and how high are the intellectual quarters 
, from which they come. Christian ethics still 
I in part retain their hold. So does the Church 
as a social centre and a reputed safeguard of 
social order. But faith in the dogmatic creed 
and the history is waxing faint. Ritualism 
itself seems to betray the need of a new stimu- 
lus and to be in some measure an sesthetic sub- 
stitute for spiritual religion. 

Dogmatic religion may be said to have re- 
ceived a fatal wound three centuries ago, when 
the Ptolemaic system was succeeded by the 
Copernican, and the real relation of the earth 



GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE i) 

to the universe was disclosed. Dogmatic reli- 
gion is geocentric. It assumes that our earth is 
the centre of the universe, the primary object 
of divine care, and the grand theatre of divine 
administration. The tendency was carried to 
the height of travesty when an insanely ultra- 
montane party at Rome meditated, as, if we 
may believe Dr. Pusey, it did, the declaration 
of a hypostatic union of the Pope and the Holy 
Ghost. 

The effect of the blow dealt by Copernicus 
was long suspended, but it is fully felt now 
that the kingdom of science is come, and the 
bearings of scientific discovery are generally 
known. When daylight gives place to star- 
light we are transported from the earth to the 
universe, and to the thoughts which the con- 
templation of the universe begets. " What is 
man, that Thou art mindful of him ? " is the 
question that then arises in our minds. Is it 
possible that so much importance as the creeds 
impl}^ can attach to this tiny planet and to the 
little drama of humanity ? We might be half 
inclined to think that man has taken himself 
too seriously and that in the humorous part of 



6 GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 

our nature, overlooked by philosophy, is to be 
found the key to his mystery. The feeling is 
enhanced when we consider that we have no 
reason for believing that the evidence of our 
senses is exhaustive, however much Science, 
with her telescopes, microscopes, and spectro- 
scopes, may extend their range. We cannot 
tell that we are not like the sightless denizens of 
the Mammoth Cave, unconsciously living in the 
midst of wonders and glories beyond our ken. 

Nor has the natural theology of the old 
school suffered from free criticism much less 
than revelation. Optimism of the orthodox 
kind seems no longer possible. Christianity 
itself, indeed, is not optimistic. It represents 
I the earth as cursed for man's sake, ascribing 
^ the curse to primeval sin, and the prevalence 
of evil in the moral world as not only great but 
permanent, since those who enter the gate of 
eternal death are many, while those who enter 
the gate of eternal life are few. Natural theol- 
ogy of the optimistic school and popular reli- 
gion have thus been at variance with each 
other. The old argument from design is now 
met with the answer that we have nothing 



GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 7 

with which to compare this world, and there- 
fore cannot tell whether it was possible for 
it to be other than it is. Mingled with the 
signs of order, science discloses apparent signs 
of disorder, miscarriage, failure, wreck, and 
waste. Our satellite, so far as we can see, 
is either a miscarriage or a wreck. Natural 
selection by a struggle for existence, protracted 
through countless ages, with the painful ex- 
tinction of the weaker members of the race, 
and even of whole races, is hardly the course 
which benevolence, such as we conceive it, 
combined with omnipotence, would be ex- 
pected to take. If in the case of men suffer- 
ing is discipline, though this can hardly be 
said when infants die or myriads are indis- 
criminately swept off by plague, in the case 
of animals, which are incapable of discipline 
and have no future life, it can be nothing 
but suffering ; and it often amounts to tor- 
ture. The evil passions of men, with all the 
miseries and horrors which they have pro- 
duced, are a part of human nature, which 
itself is a part of creation. Through the 
better parts of human nature and what there 



8 GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 

is of order, beneficence, majesty, tenderness, 
and beauty in the universe, a spirit is felt 
appealing to ours, and a promise seems to be 
^ conveyed. But if omnipotence and benevo- 
I lence are to meet, it must apparently be at a 
point at present beyond our ken. These are 
the perplexities which obtrude themselves on 
a scientific age. 

What is man ? Whence comes he ? Whither 
goes he? In the hands of what power is 
he? What are the character and designs of 
that power? These are questions which, now 
directly presented to us, are of such over- 
whelming magnitude that we almost wonder 
at the zeal and heat which other questions, 
such as party politics, continue to excite. 
The interest felt in them, however, is daily 
deepening, and an attentive audience is assured 
to any one who comes forward with a solution, 
however crude, of the mystery of existence. 
Attentive audiences have gathered round Mr. 
Kidd, Mr. Drummond, and Mr. Balfour, each 
of whom has a theory to propound. Mr. 
Kidd's work has had special vogue, and the 
compliments which its author pays to Pro- 



GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 9 

fessor Weismann have been reciprocated by 
that luminary of science. 

Mr. Drummond undertakes to reconcile, and 
more than reconcile, our natural theology and 
our moral instincts to the law of evolution. 
His title, The Ascent of Man, is not new ; 
probably it has been used by more than one 
writer before ; nor is he the first to point 
out that the humble origin of the human 
species, instead of dejecting, ought to encour- 
age us, since the being who has risen from 
an ape to Socrates and Newton may hope to 
rise still higher in the future, if not by 
further physical development, which physi- 
ology seems to bar by pronouncing the brain 
unsusceptible of further organic improvement, 
yet by intellectual and moral effort. Mr. 
Drummond treats his subject with great brill- 
iancy of style and adorns it with very in- 
teresting illustrations. Not less firmly than 
Voltaire's optimist persuaded himself that 
this was the best of all possible worlds, he 
has persuaded himself that evolution was the 
only right method of creation. He ulti- 
mately identifies it with love. The cruelties 



10 GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 

incidental to it he palliates with a compla- 
cency which sometimes provokes a smile. All 
of them seem to him comparatively of little 
account, inasmuch as the struggle for exist- 
ence was to lead up to the struggle for the 
existence of others, in other words, to the 
production of maternity and paternity, with 
the altruism, as he terms it, or, as we have 
hitherto termed it, the affection, attendant 
on those relations. To reconcile us to the 
sufferings of the vanquished in the struggle 
he dilates on "the keenness of its energies, 
the splendour of its stimulus, its bracing effect 
on character, its wholesome lessons through- 
out the whole range of character." "With- 
out the vigorous weeding of the imperfect," 
he says, "the progress of the world would 
not have been possible." Pleasant reading 
this for " the imperfect " ! 

"If fit and unfit indiscriminately had been allowed to 
live and reproduce their kind, every improvement which 
any individual might acquire would be degraded to the 
common level in the course of a few generations. Prog- 
ress can only start by one or two individuals shooting 
ahead of their species; and their life-gain can only be 
conserved by their being shut off from their species — 



GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 11 

or by their species being shut off from them. Unless 
shut off from their species their acquisition will either 
be neutralized in the course of time by the swamping 
effect of inter-breeding with the common herd, or so 
diluted as to involve no real advance. The only chance 
for evolution, then, is either to carry off these improved 
editions into 'physiological isolation,' or to remove the 
unimproved editions by wholesale death. The first of 
these two alternatives is only occasionally possible ; the 
second always. Hence the death of the unevolved, or 
of the unadapted in reference to some new and higher 
relation with envu'onment, is essential to the perpetua- 
tion of a useful variation." 

This reasoning, with much more to the 
same effect, is plainly a limitation of omnip- 
otence. It supposes that the ruling power 
of the universe could attain the end only at ^ 
the expense of wholesale carnage and suffer- ■•^' 
ing, facts which cannot be glozed over, and 
which, as the weakness was not the fault ^^ 
of the weak, but of their Maker, are in V' 
apparently irreconcilable conflict with our 
human notions of benevolence and justice. 

This, however, is not all. We might, com- 
paratively speaking, be reconciled to Mr. Drum- 
mond's plan of creation if all the carnage and 
suffering could be shown to be necessary or 



12 GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 

even conducive to the great end of giving birth 
to humanity and love. But Mr. Drummond 
himself has to admit that natural selection by 
no means invariably works in the direction of 
i progress ; that in the case of parasites its result 
has been almost utter degradation. The phe- 
nomena of parasites and entozoa, with the need- 
less torments which they inflict, appear irrecon- 
cilable with any optimistic theory of the direc- 
tion of suffering and destruction to a paramount 
and compensating end. Not only so, but all the 
"^ extinct races except those which are in the line 
' leading up to man and may be numbered among 
his progenitors, must apparently, upon Mr. 
Drummond's hypothesis, have suffered and 
perished in vain. That "a price, a price in 
pain, and assuredly sometimes a very terrible 
price," has been paid for the evolution of the 
world, after all is said, Mr. Drummond admits 
to be certain. But he holds it indisputable 
that even at the highest estimate the thing 
bought with that price was none too dear, inas- 
much as it was nothing less than the present 
progress of the world. So he thinks we " may 
safely leave Nature to look after her own ethic." 



GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 13 

Probably we might if all the pain was part of 
the price. But we are distinctly told that it 
was not ; so that there is much of it in which, 
with our present lights or any that Mr. Drum- 
mond is able to afford us, men can hardly help 
thinking that they see the ruthless operation of 
blind chance. Nature, being a mere abstraction, 
has no ethic to look after ; nor has Evolution, 
which is not a power, but a method, though it 
is personified, we might almost say deified, by 
its exponent. But if there is not some higher 
authority which looks after ethic, what becomes 
of the ethic of man ? The most inhuman of 
vivisectors, if he could show that his practice 
really led, or was at all likely to lead, to know- 
ledge, would have a better plea than, in the 
case of suffering and destruction which have 
led to nothing, the philosophy of evolution can 
by itself put in for the Author of our being. 

Mr. Drummond's treatise, like those of other 
evolutionists, at least of the optimistic school, 
assumes the paramount value of the type, and 
the rightfulness of sacrificing individuals with- 
out limit to its perfection and preservation. 
But this assumption surely requires to be made 



14 guess:es at the riddle of existence 

good, both to our intellects and to our hearts. 
The ultimate perfection and preservation of 
the type cannot, so far as we see, indemnify 
the individuals who have perished miserably in 
the preliminary stages. Far from having an 
individual interest in the evolution of the type, 
the sufferers of the ages before Darwin had not 
^ even the clear idea of a type for their consola- 
tion. Besides, what is the probable destiny of the 
type itself ? Science appears to tell us pretty 
confidently that the days of our planet, how- 
ever many they may be, are numbered, and that 
it is doomed at last to fall back into primeval 
chaos, with all the types which it may contain. 
Evolutionists, in their enthusiasm for the 
species, are apt to bestow little thought on the 
sentient members of which it consists. "Man " 
is a mere generalization. This they forget, 
and speak as if all men j)ersonally^ shared the 
crown of the final^heir^^^^^ civilization. 

The following passage is an instance : — 

"Science is charged, be it once more recalled, with 
numbering Man among the beasts, and levelling his body 
with the dust. But he who reads for himself the history 
of creation as it is written by the hand of Evolution will 



GUHJSSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE W 

be overwhelmed by the glory and honour heaped upon this 
creature. To be a Man, and to have no conceivable suc- 
cessor; to be the fruit and crown of the long-past eter- 
nity, and the highest possible fruit and crown ; to be the 
last victor among the decimated phalanxes of earlier ex- 
istences, and to be nevermore defeated ; to be the best 
that Nature in her streng-th and opulence can produce ; 
to be the first of the new order of beings who, by their 
dominion over the lower world and their equipment for 
a higher, reveal that they are made in the Image of God 
— to be this is to be elevated to a rank in Nature more 
exalted than any philosophy or any poetry or any theol- 
ogy has ever given to man. Man was always told that 
his place was high ; the reason for it he never knew till 
now ; he never knew that his title deeds were the very 
laws of Nature, that he alone was the Alpha and Omega 
of Creation, the beginning and the end of Matter, the 
final goal of Life." ,i„^,^^,^/^^| ^.^,£ir^Px^' ^■"■- ^^ ^^- 



To be the last victor among the decimated 
phalanxes of earlier existences, and to be 
nevermore defeated, is, to say the least, a dif- 
ferent sort of satisfaction from the glorious 
triumph of love in which the process of Evolu- 
tion, according to Mr. Drummond, ends, and 
in virtue of which he proclaims that Evolu- 
tion is nothing but the Involution of love, the 
revelation of Infinite Spirit, the Eternal Life 
returning to itself. It even reminds us a little 



16 GUSSSJES AT THE MIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 

of the unamiable belief that in the next world 
the sight of the wicked in torment will be a 
part of the enjoyment of the righteous. Per- 
haps there is also a touch of lingering geocen- 
tricism in this rapturous exaltation of Man. 
Evolution can give us no assurance that there 
are not in other planets creatures no less 
superior to man than he is to the lower tribes 
upon this earth. 

The crown of evolution in Mr. Drummond's 
system is the evolution of a mother, accom- 
panied by that of a father, which, however, 
appears to be inferior in degree. The chapters 
on this subject are more than philosophy ; they 
are poetry, soaring almost into rhapsody. 
"The goal," Mr. Drummond says, "of the 
whole plant and animal kingdoms seems to 
have been the creation of a family which the 
very naturalist has to call mammals." The 
following passage is the climax : — 

"But by far the most vital point remains. For we 
have next to observe how this bears directly on the theme 
we set out to explore — the Evolution of Love. The pas- 
sage from mere Otherism, in the physiological sense, to 
Altruism, in the moral sense, occurs in connection with 



GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 17 

the due performance of her natural task by her to whom 
the Struggle for the Life of Others is assigned. That 
task, translated into one great word, is Maternity — 
which is nothing but the Struggle for the Life of Others 
transfigured to the moral sphere. Focussed in a single 
human being, this function, as we rise in history, slowly 
begins to be accompanied by those heaven-born psychical 
states which transform the femaleness of the older order 
into the Motherhood of the new. When one follows 
Maternity out of the depths of lower IsTature, and beholds 
it ripening in quality as it reaches the human sphere, its 
character, and the character of the processes by which it 
is evolved, appear in their full divinity. For of what is 
maternity the mother? Of children? No ; for these are 
the mere vehicle of its spiritual manifestation. Of affec- 
tion between female and male ? No ; for that, contrary 
to accepted beliefs, has little to do in the first instance 
with sex-relations. Of what then? Of Love itself, of 
Love as Love, of Love as Life, of Love as Humanity, of 
Love as the pure and undefiled fountain of all that is 
eternal in the world. In the long stillness which follows 
the crisis of Maternity, witnessed only by the new and 
helpless life which is at once the last expression of the 
older function and the unconscious vehicle of the new, 
Humanity is born." 

The father seems to be here shut out from 
the apotheosis ; though why, except from a sort 
of philosophic gallantry, it is difficult to dis- 
cern. The man who toils from morning till 



18 GUESSES AT THE MIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 

night to support wife and child surely has not 
less to do with it than the woman who feeds 
the child from her breast. 

Somewhat paradoxical as it may seem, Mr. 
Drummond maintains that love did not come 
from lovers. It was not they that bestowed 
this gift upon the world. It was the first 
child, "till whose appearance man's affection 
was non-existent, woman's was frozen ; and 
man did not love the woman, and woman did 
not love the man." Apparently, then, in a 
childless couple there can be no love. Here, 
according to Mr. Drummond, is the birth of 
Altruism, for which all creation has travailed 
from the beginning of time. This appears to 
him a satisfactory solution of the problem of 
existence. Yet the races which have been sac- 
rificed to the production of altruism, if they 
were critical and could find a voice, might ask 
if there was anything totally unselfish in the 
indulgence of the sexual passion, which after 
all plays its part in the matter, and of which 
the birth of a child is the unavoidable, not 
perhaps always the welcome, consequence. To 
the mother the child is necessary for a time 



GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 19 

in order to relieve her of a physical secretion, 
while it repays her care by its endearments, 
the enjoyment of which is altruistic only on 
the irrational hypothesis that affection and 
domesticity are not parts of self. To both 
parents, in the primitive state at all events, 
children are necessary as the support and pro- 
tection of old age. Beautiful and touching 
parental affection is ; pure altruism it is not. 
Very admirable, as a part of man's estate, it 
is ; but we can hardly accept its appearance 
as a sufficient justification of all that has been 
suffered in the process of evolution or as a 
solution of the mystery of existence. It is 
curious that Mr. Drumraond should place the 
happiest scene of female development and all 
that depends on it in the country where 
divorces are most common and the increase of 
their number is most rapid. He may have 
noted, too, that in that same country and 
among the most highly civilized races families 
are proportionately small and fewer women 
become mothers. 

Then, put the mammalia as high as we will 
in the scale of being, they are mortal. Evo- 



20 GUIJSSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 

lution tells us complacently that death is 
necessary to the progress of the species. It 
may be so ; but what is that to the individ- 
ual ? The more intense and exalted affection, 
whether conjugal or parental, is, the more 
heartrending is the thought of the parting 
which any day and any one of a thousand 
accidents may bring, while it is sure to come 
after a few years. Pleasure and happiness 
are different things. Pleasure may be en- 
joyed for the moment without any thought 
of the future. The condemned criminal may 
enjoy it, and, it seems, does not uncommonly 
enjoy it in eating his last meal. But happi- 
ness appears to be hardly possible without a 
sense of security, much less with annihilation 
always in sight. The oracle to which we 
are listening has told us nothing about a life 
beyond the present. It is needless to say 
how much the character of that question has 
been altered since the corporeal origin and 
relations of our mental faculties, and of what 
theology calls the soul, have been apparently 
disclosed by science. The thought of con- 
scious existence without end is one which 



GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 21 

makes the mind, as it were, ache, and under 
which imagination reels ; yet the thought of 
annihilation is not welcome, nor have we up 
to this time distinctly faced it. If ever it 
should be distinctly faced by us, its influence 
on life and action can hardly fail to be felt. 
Is the evolutionary optimist himself content 
to believe that nothing will survive the wreck, 
inevitable, if science is to be trusted, of this 
world ? 

To say that a particular solution of a diffi- 
culty is incomplete is not to say that the 
difficulty is insoluble or even to pronounce 
the particular solution worthless. Mr. Drum- 
mond's solution may be incomplete, and yet 
it may have value. The only moral excel- 
lence of which we have any experience or 
can form a distinct idea, is that produced by 
moral effort. If we try to form an idea of 
moral excellence unproduced by effort, the 
only result is seraphic insipidity. This may 
seem to afford a glimpse of possible recon- 
ciliation between evolution and our moral 
instincts. If upward struggle towards perfec- 
tion, rather than perfection created by fiat, 



22 GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 

is the law of the universe, we may see in it, 
at all events, something analogous to the law 
of our moral nature. 

Mr. Kidd's theory is that man owes his 
progress to his having acted against his 
reason in obedience to a supernatural and 
extra-rational sanction of action which is 
identified with religion. The interest of the 
individual and that of society, Mr. Kidd 
holds to be radically opposed to each other. 
Reason bids the individual prefer his own 
interest. The supernatural and extra-rational 
sanction bids him prefer the interest of so- 
ciety, which is assumed to be paramount, and 
thus civilization advances. The practical con- 
clusion is that the churches are the greatest 
instruments of human progress. 

What does Mr. Kidd mean by reason ? He 
appears to regard it as a special organ or 
faculty, capable of being contradicted by 
another faculty, as one sense sometimes for a 
moment contradicts another sense, or as our 
senses are corrected by our intelligence in 
the case of the apparent motion of the sun. 
But our reason comprises all the mental ante- 



GUJESSJSS AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 23 

cedents of action. It is the man's intellectual 
self. To be misled by it when weak or per- 
verted is possible; to act consciously against 
it is not. Simeon Stylites obeys it as well as ^ 
Sardanapalus or Jay Gould. He believes, how- ^* 
ever absurdly, that the Deity accepts the sacri- 
fice of self-torture, and that it will be well for 
the self -torturer in the sum of things. His 
self-torture is therefore in accordance with 
his individual reason, though it is far enough 
from being in accordance with reason in the 
abstract. A supernatural sanction, supposing 
its reality to be proved, becomes a part of the 
data on which reason acts, or rather it becomes, 
for the occasion, the sole datum; and to obey 
it, instead of being unreasonable, is the most 
reasonable thing in the world. Misled by his 
reason, we repeat, to any extent a man may be, 
both in matters speculative and practical; but 
he can no more think or act outside of his 
reason, that is, the entirety of his impressions 
and inducements, than he can jump out of his 
skin. What Mr. Kidd seems at bottom to 
mean is that we may and do, with the best 
results, prefer social to individual, and moral to 



24 OUESSJSS AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 

material, objects. But this is a totally different 
thing from acting against reason, and while it 
requires a certain elevation of character, it 
requires no extra-rational motive. 

Mr. Kidd speaks of "reason" and the ca- 
pacity for acting with his fellows in society as 
" two new forces which made their advent with 
man." He cannot mean, what his words might 
be taken to imply, that the rudiments of reason 
are not discernible in brutes, or that sociability 
does not prevail in the herd, the swarm, and 
the hive. To the herd, the swarm, and the 
hive sacrifices of the individual animal or insect 
are made like those of the individual man to 
his community. Is there supernatural or extra- 
rational sanction in the case of the deer, the 
ant, or the bee ? 

Altruism, acting against reason with a super- 
natural and extra-rational sanction, is, accord- 
ing to Mr. Kidd, the motive power of progress. 
But this altruism of which we hear so much, 
what is it ? Man is not only a self -regardant, 
but a sympathetic, domestic, and social being. 
He is so by nature, just as he is a biped or a 
mammal. How he became so the physiologist 



GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 25 

and psychologist must be left to explain. But 
a sympathetic, domestic, and social being he is, 
and in gratifying his sympathetic, domestic, or 
social propensities, he is no more altruistic, if 
altruism means disregard of self, than he is 
when he gratifies his desire of food or motion. 
Self is not disregarded, because self is sympa- 
thetic, domestic, and social. The man of feel- 
ing identifies himself with his kind; the father 
with his children; the patriot with his state; 
and they all look in various forms for a return 
of their affection or devotion. The man in 
each of the cases goes out of his narrower self, 
but he does not go out of self. Show us the 
altruist who gives up his dinner to benefit the 
inhabitants of the planet Mars, and we will 
admit the existence of altruism in the sense in 
which the term seems to be used by Mr. Kidd 
and some other philosophers of to-day. 

Reason, as defined by Mr. Kidd, appears to 
be a faculty which tells us what is desirable, 
but does not tell us what is possible. "The 
lower classes of our population," he says, " have 
no sanction from reason for maintaining exist- 
ing conditions." " They should in self-interest 



26 GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 

put an immediate end to existing social condi- 
tions." Why, so they would if they had the 
power, supposing their condition and the causes 
of it to be what Mr. Kidd represents. It is 
(1?) not altruism that prevents them, but necessity; 
the same necessity which constrains people of 
all classes to submit to evils of various kinds, 
submission to which, if unnecessary, would be 
idiotic. That poverty and calamity have been 
endured more patiently in the hope of a com- 
pensation hereafter is true, but makes no differ- 
ence as to the reasonableness of the endurance. 
From a comparison of the two sentences just 
quoted, it would appear that Mr. Kidd identi- 
fies reason with self-interest, and, therefore, with 
something antagonistic to society. Whereas, in 
a sociable being, conformity to the laws of society 
is reason. *' The interests of the social organism 
and of the individual," says Mr. Kidd, "are and 
must remain antagonistic." Why so in the case 
of a man any more than in that of a bee ? 

What is the " supernatural and extra-rational 
sanction " in virtue of which man acts against 
the dictates of his reason, and by so acting 
makes progress ? Religion. What is religion ? 



GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 27 

"A religion is a form of belief providing an ultra- 
rational sanction for that large class of conduct in 
the individual M^here his interests and the interests of 
the social organism are antagonistic, and by which the 
former are rendered subordinate to the latter in the 
general interests of the evolution which the race is ^ 
undergoing." 

Here is a definition of religion without men- 
tion of God. The supernatural sanction is re- 
ligion, and religion is a supernatural sanction. 
This surely does not give us much new light. 
But we are further told that " there can never 
be such a thing as a rational religion." Super- 
stition, such as the worship of Moloch, that of 
Apis, that of the Gods of Mexico, or mediaeval 
religion in its debased form, is not rational, 
nor will our calling it supernatural or extra- 
rational make it an influence above nature and 
reason, or prove it to have been the motive 
power of progress, which, on the contrary, it 
has retarded and sometimes, as in the case of 
Egypt, killed outright. But religions which 
in their day have been instruments of progress, 
and among which may perhaps be numbered, 
at a grade lower than Christianity, Moham- 
medanism and Buddhism, have owed their 



28 GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 

character to their rational adaptation to human 
nature and their consecration of rational effort. 
They are counterparts, not of the polytheistic 
state religion of Greece, but of the Socratic 
philosophy, which had a divinity of its own, 
the impersonation of its morality, and paid 
homage to the state polytheism only by sacri- 
ficing a cock to ^sculapius. Christianity, as 
it came from the lips of Jesus of Nazareth, 
was, like the philosophy of Socrates, unliturgi- 
cal and unsacerdotal ; its liturgy was one sim- 
ple prayer. " Supernatural " is a convenient 
word, but it by implication begs the question, 
and when applied to superstitions is most fal- 
lacious. " Infranatural," or something imply- 
ing degradation and grossness, not elevation 
above the world of sense, would be the right 
expression. Christian ethics, as distinguished 
from dogma, are not supernatural ; they are 
drawn from, and adapted to, human nature. 

It is disappointing to find that a theorist 
who makes everything depend on the in- 
fluence of religion should not have attempted 
to ascertain precisely what religion is and what 
is its origin, or to distinguish from each other 



GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 29 

the widely diverse phenomena which bear the 
name. His sanction itself calls for a sanction 
and calls in vain. 

When a hypothesis will not bear inspection 
in itself, time is wasted in applying it, or test- 
ing its applications, to history. But Mr. Kidd 
says of the first fourteen centuries after Christ: 

" So far, fourteen centuries of the history of our civiliza- 
tion had been devoted to the growth and development of 
a stupendous system of other-worldliness. The conflict 
against reason had been successful to a degree never be- 
fore equalled in the history of the world. The super- 
rational sanction of conduct had attained a strength and 
universality unknown in the Roman and Greek civiliza- 
tions. The State was a divine institution. The ruler 
held his place by divine right, and every political office * 
and all subsidiary power issued from him in virtue of the 
same authority. Every consideration of the present was 
over-shadowed in men's minds by conceptions of a future 
life, and the whole social and political system and the in- jS\ 
dividual lives of men had become profoundly tinged with ^ * 
the prevailing ideas." 

Of all the actions by which mediaeval 
civilization was moulded and advanced, what 
percentage does Mr. Kidd suppose to have 
been performed under religious influence or 
from a spiritual motive? How many feudal 



30 GUi:SSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 

kings and lords — how many, even, of the 
ecclesiastical statesmen of the Middle Ages — 
does he suppose to have been carrying on a 
conflict with reason for objects other than 
worldly and under the inspiration of divine 
right? How much resemblance to the 
character of the Author of Christianity 
would he have found among the rulers and 
the active spirits of the community or even 
of the Church ? How much among the occu- 
pants of the Papal throne itself? 

Other critics have pointed out that Mr. 
Kidd, to say the least, overstates his case in 
saying that Christianity was directly opposed 
by all the intellectual forces of the time. So 
close was the affinity of Roman Stoicism to 
it that one eminent French writer has under- 
taken to demonstrate the influence of Chris- 
tianity on the writings of the Roman Stoics. 
It had intellectual champions as soon as it 
had intellectual assailants, and their arguments 
were addressed to reason. The pessimistic 
melancholy of a falling empire and the revolt 
from a decrepit polytheism were also intel- 
lectual or partly intellectual forces on its side. 



GUJESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 31 

In tiie recent concessions of political power 
by the upper classes to the masses, Mr. Kidd 
finds an example of altruism prevailing over 
reason. That something has in the course 
of this revolution occasionally prevailed over 
reason might be very plausibly maintained. 
Whether it was anything supernatural or ex- 
tra-rational seems very doubtful. In Great 
Britain, for instance, the extension of the 
franchise in 1832 was the result of a conflict 
between classes and parties carried on in a 1^' 
spirit as far as possible from altruistic and ^-'^ 
pushed to the very verge of civil war. After- "^' 
wards, the Whig leader, finding himself politi- 
cally becalmed, brought in a new Reform Bill 
to raise the wind, and was outbid by Derby 
and Disraeli, whose avowed object was to 
"dish the Whigs." Of altruistic self-sacrifice 
it would be difficult in the whole process to 
find much trace. 

If this branch of the inquiry were to be 
pursued, it might be worth while for Mr. Kidd 
to consider the case of Japan, the progress of 
which of late has been so marvellously rapid. 
It appears that in Japan, while the lower 



32 GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 

classes have a superstition at once very gross 
and very feeble, the upper classes, by whom 
the movement has been initiated and carried 
forward, have no genuine religion, but at most 
official forms, such as could not sustain action 
against self-interest. 

The cause of human progress has been the 
desire of man to improve his condition, ever 
mounting as, with the success of his efforts, 
fresh possibilities of improvement were brought 
within his view. It is in this respect he spe- 
cially differs from the brutes. Mechanical evo- 
lution and selection by mere struggle for exist- 
ence apply to man in his rudimentary state or 
in his character as an animal. Of humanity, 
desire of improvement is the motive power. 
There is no need, therefore, of importing the 
language, fast becoming a jargon, of evolution 
into our general treatment of history. Bees, 
ants, and beavers are marvels of nature in 
their way. But they show no desire for im- 
provement, and make no effort to improve. 
Man alone aspires. The aspiration is weak in 
the lower races of men, strong in the higher. 
Of its existence and of the different degrees 



GUESSES AT THE MIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 33 

in which it exists, science may be able to give 
an account. But it certainly is not the off- 
spring of unreason, nor can it be aided in any 
way by superstition or by any rejection of truth. 

A work on the foundations of religious be- 
lief by the leader of a party in the British 
House of Commons, who is by some marked 
out as a future Prime Minister, shows, like 
the theological and cosmogonical essays of 
Mr. Gladstone, the increasing interest felt 
about these problems, not only by divines and 
philosophers, but by men of the world. In 
Mr. Balfour's case the union of speculation 
with politics is the more striking, inasmuch 
as his work is one of abstruse philosophy. It 
is by metaphysical arguments that he under- 
takes to overthrow systems opposed to reli- 
gion, and to rebuild the dilapidated edifice on 
new and surer foundations. He is thus tread- 
ing in the steps of Coleridge, the great reli- 
gious philosopher of the English Church. It 
is to a limited circle of readers that he appeals. 
Ordinary minds find metaphysics " out of 
their welkin," to use the words of the Clown 



34 GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 

in Twelfth Night. They venerate from afar a 
study which has engaged and still engages the 
attention of powerful intellects. But they are 
themselves lost in the region in which "tran- 
scendental solipsism" has its home. They 
are unable to see at what definitive conclu- 
sions, still more, at what practical conclusions, 
such as might influence conduct, philosophy 
has arrived. Metaphysic seems to them to be 
in a perpetual state of flux. "The theories 
of the great metaphysicians of the past," Mr. 
Balfour says, " are no concern of ours." They 
would surely concern us, however, if, like suc- 
cessive schools of science, they had made some 
real discoveries and left something substantial 
behind them. But as Mr. Balfour plaintively 
tells us, the system of Plato, notwithstanding 
I the beauty of its literary vesture, has no effect- 
5 ual vitality ; our debts to Aristotle, though 
immense, "do not include a tenable theory 
of the universe " ; in the Stoic metaphysics 
"nobody takes any interest." The Neo-Pla- 
tonists were mystics, and in mysticism Mr. 
Balfour recognizes an undying element of hu- 
man thought, but "nobody is concerned about 



GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 35 

their hierarchy of beings connecting through 
infinite gradations the Absolute at one end 
of the scale with matter at the other." The 
metaphysics of Descartes "are not more liv- 
ing than his physics " ; neither " his two sub- 
stances, nor the single substance of Spinoza, 
nor the innumerable substances of Leibnitz 
satisfy the searcher after truth." Had these 
several systems been investigations of matters 
in which real discovery was possible, each of 
them surely would have discovered something, 
and a certain interest in each of them would 
remain. But they have flitted like a series 
of dreams, or a succession of kaleidoscopic 
variations. Mr. Balfour doubts "whether any 
metaphysical philosopher before Kant can be 
said to have made contributions to this sub- 
ject [a theory of nature] which at the present 
day need to be taken into serious account," 
and he presently proceeds to indicate that 
"Kant's doctrines, even as modified by his 
successors, do not provide a sound basis for an 
epistemology of nature." Mr. Balfour seems 
even to think that philosophy is in some de- 
gree a matter of national temperament. He 



36 GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 

says that the philosophy of Kant and other 
German philosophers will never be thoroughly 
received so as to form standards of reference 
in any English-speaking community "until 
the ideas of these speculative giants are thor- 
oughly re-thought by Englishmen and repro- 
duced in a shape which ordinary Englishmen 
will consent to assimilate." "Under ordinary 
conditions," he says, "philosophy cannot, like 
science, become international." This seems 
as much as saying that philosophy is still not 
a department of science, or a real investiga- 
tion resulting in truths evident to all the 
world alike, but a mode of looking at things 
which may vary with national peculiarities 
of mind and character. 

Locke, as Mr. Balfour reminds us, toward 
the end of his great work assures his readers 
that he " suspects that natural philosophy is 
not capable of being made science," and 
serenely draws from his admissions the moral 
that " as we are so little fitted to frame theo- 
ries about this present world we had better 
/ 4 I devote our energies to preparing for the next." 
^' ■ Perhaps we might amend the suggestion by 



GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 37 

saying that most of us had better devote our 
energies to the search for attainable truth and 
to the improvement of our character and es- 
tate in this world as a preparation for the 
world to come. A man so metaphysical in 
his cast as Emerson is obliged to say that 
we know nothing of nature or of ourselves, 
and that man has not " taken one step towards 
the solution of the problem of his destiny." 

Before the relation of mind and body had 
been proved, and while the mind was sup- 
posed to have a divine origin of its own and 
to be a sojourner in the body as a temporary 
home or prison-house, it was perhaps easier to 
believe, as did the mediaeval philosophers, that 
in the mind there was a source of knowledge 
about the universe apart from the perceptions 
of sense, and that the world might be studied, 
not by observation, but by introspection, and 
even through the analysis of language as the 
embodiment of ideas. Transcendental Solip- 
sism and a world constructed out of catego- 
ries, would, under those conditions, have their 
day. Something of the mediseval disposition 
seems to lurk in the effort to demonstrate 



38 GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 

that the material world has no existence apart 
from our perceptions. Be this true or not, it 
can make little difference in our theological or 
spiritual position. The fact must be the same 
in the case of a dog as in the case of a man. 
Most of us, therefore, will be content to 
look on while Mr. Balfour's metaphysical 
blade, flashing to the right and left, disposes 
of " Naturalism " on the one hand and of 
Transcendentalism on the other. We have 
only to put in a gentle caveat against any 
idea of driving the world back through gen- 
eral scepticism to faith. Scepticism, not only 
general, but universal, is more likely to be 
the ultimate result, and any faith which is 
not spontaneous, whether it be begotten of 
ecclesiastical pressure or intellectual despair, 
is, and in the end will show itself to be, 
merely veiled unbelief. The catastrophe of 
Dean Mansel, who, while he was trying in 
the interest of orthodoxy, to cut the ground 
from under the feet of the Rationalist, him- 
self inadvertently demonstrated the impossi- 
bility of believing in God, was an awful 
warning to the polemical tactician. 



GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 39 

Mr. Balfour gets on more practical ground 
and comes more within the range of general 
interest when he proceeds to set up authority 
apart from reason as a foundation of theologi- 
cal belief. Above reason authority must ap- 
parently be if it is apart from it, for wherever ' 
authority has established itself reason must ' 
give way, while it has no means of constrain- ' 
ing the submission of authority. No one could " 
be less inclined to presumptuous rationalism 
than Butler, who, in his work, which though 
in partial ruin is still great, with noble frank- 
ness accepts reason as our only guide to truth. 
In combating the objections against the evi- 
dences of Christianity, Butler says that " he 
expresses himself with caution lest he should 
be mistaken to vilify reason, which is indeed 
the only faculty we have to judge concerning 
anything, even revelation." What is defer- 
ence to authority but the deference to su- 
perior knowledge or wisdom which reason 
pays, and which, if its grounds, intellectual 
or moral, fail or become doubtful, reason will 
withdraw? This is just as true with regard 
to the authority of tradition as with regard 



40 GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 

to that of a living informant or adviser ; just 
as true with regard to the authority of a 
Church as with regard to that of an individ- 
ual teacher or guide. Authority, Mr. Bal- 
four says, as the term is used by him, " is in 
all cases contrasted with reason and stands 
for that group of non-rational causes, moral, 
social, and educational, which produces its 
results by psychic processes other than rea- 
son." A writer may affix to a term any sense 
he pleases for his personal convenience ; but 
the reasoning of the psychic process of defer- 
ence to authority, though undeveloped, and, 
perhaps, till it is challenged, unconscious, 
whether its cause be moral, social, or edu- 
cational, is capable of being presented in a 
rational form, and cannot, therefore, be rightly 
called non-rational. There is, of course, a sort 
of authority, so styled, which impresses itself 
by means other than rational, such as religious 
persecution, priestly thaumaturgy, spiritual ter- 
rorism, or social tyranny. But in this Mr. 
Balfour would not recognize a source of truth 
or foundation of theological belief. A phi- 
» losopher who proposes to rebuild theology, 



GUESSES AT THE MIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 41 

wholly or in part, on the basis of authority, 
seems bound to provide us with some analy- 
sis of authority itself, and some test by which 
genuine authority may be distinguished from 
ancient and venerable imposture. Papal in- 
fallibility, which Mr. Balfour cites as an 
instance, does undoubtedly postulate the sub- -" 
mission of reason to authority; but it proved - 
the necessity of that submission by the exter- -^ 
mination of the Albigenses and the holocausts 
of the Inquisition. It is still ready, as its "■ 
Encyclical and Syllabus intimate, to sustain 
the demonstration by the help of the secular ..^ 
arm. 

So in the case of habit. Our common actions 
have no doubt become by use automatic, as our 
common beliefs are accepted without investiga- 
tion. But if they are challenged, reasons for 
them can be given. A man eats without think- 
ing, but if he is called upon, he can give a good 
reason for taking food. A soldier obeys the 
word of command mechanically, but if he were 
called upon, he could give a good reason for his 
obedience. 

Mr. Balfour scarcely lets us see distinctly 



42 GUESSHS AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 

what is his view of belief in miracles, which 
must play an important part in any reconstruc- 
tion or review of the basis of theology; an all- 
important part, indeed, if Paley was right in 
saying, as he did in reply to Hume, that there 
was no way other than miracle by which God 
could be revealed. He seems inclined to repre- 
sent the objections to them as philosophical 
rather than historical, and such as a sounder 
philosophy may dissipate, intimating that ra- 
tionalists have approached the inquiry with a 
predetermination "to force the testimony of 
existing records into conformity with theories 
on the truth or falsity of which it is for phi- 
losophy not history to pronounce." This might 
be said with some justice of Strauss's first Life 
of Jesus^ and perhaps of some other German 
philosophies of the Gospel history. But the 
current objections to miracles, with which a 
theologian has to deal, are clearly of a historical 
kind. A miracle is an argument addressed 
through the sense to the understanding, which 
pronounces that the thing done is supernatural 
and proof of the intervention of a higher power. 
It seems inconceivable, if the salvation of the 



GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 43 

world were to depend on belief in miracles, 
that Providence should have failed to provide 
records for the assurance of those who were 
not eye-witnesses equal in certainty to the evi- 
dence afforded eye-witnesses by sense. Are 
the records of the miracles which we possess 
unquestionably authentic and contemporane- 
ous ? Were the reporters beyond all suspicion, 
not only of deceit, but of innocent self-delusion ? 
Were they, looking to the circumstances of 
their time and their education, likely to be duly 
critical in their examination of the case ? Is 
there anything in the internal character of the 
miracles themselves, the demoniac miracles for 
example, to move suspicion, it being impossible 
to think that Providence would allow indispen- 
sable evidences of vital truth to be stamped 
with the marks of falsehood ? What is the 
weight of the adverse evidence derived from 
the silence of external history and the apparent 
absence of the impression which might have 
been expected to be made by prodigies such as 
miraculous darkness and the rising of the dead 
out of their graves ? These questions, daily 
pressed upon us by scepticism, are strictly 






44 GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 

historical, and will have to be treated by 
restorers of theological belief on strictly histori- 
cal grounds. 

Mr. Balfour recognizes mysticism as an " un- 
dying element in human thought." That it is 
not yet dead is evident. Minds not a few have 
taken refuge in various forms of it. But un- 
dying it surely is not. The mystic, however 
exalted, merely imposes on himself. He creates 
by a subtle sophistication of his own mind the 
cloudy object of his faith and worship. He has 
himself written his Book of Mormon, and hid- 
den it where he finds it. In that direction 
there can be no hope of laying the foundation 
of a new theological belief. 

There can be no hope, apparently, of laying 
new foundations for a rational theology in any 
direction excepting that of the study of the 
universe and of humanity as manifestations of 
the supreme power in that spirit of thorough- 
going intellectual honesty of which Huxley, 
who has just been taken from us, is truly said 
to have been an illustrious example. That we 
are made and intended to pursue knowledge is 
as certain as that we are made and intended to 



GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 46 

strive for the improvement of our estate, and 
we cannot tell how far or to what revelations 
the pursuit may lead us. If Revelation is 
lost, Manifestation remains, and great mani- 
festations appear to be opening on our view. 
Agnosticism is right, if it is a counsel of 
honesty, but ought not to bo heard if it is a 
counsel of despair. 



THE CHURCH AND THE OLD 
TESTAMENT 



THE CHURCH AND THE OLD 
TESTAMENT 

At tlie English Church Congress held in 
1895 at Norwich, Professor Bonney, Canon of 
Manchester, made a bold and honourable at- 
tempt to cast a millstone off the neck of Chris- 
tianity by frankly renouncing belief in the 
historical character of the earlier books of the 
Bible. 

" I cannot deny," he said, " that the increase 
of scientific knowledge has deprived parts of 
the earlier books of the Bible of the historical 
value which was generally attributed to them 
by our forefathers. The story of the creation 
in Genesis, unless we play fast and loose either 
with words or with science, cannot be brought 
into harmony with what we have learned from 
geology. Its ethnological statements are im- 
perfect, if not sometimes inaccurate. The 
stories of the flood and of the Tower of Babel 
E 49 



50 THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 

are incredible in their present form. Some his- 
torical element may underlie many of the tradi- 
tions in the first eleven chapters of that book, 
but this we cannot hope to recover." 

With the historical character of the chapters 
relating to the creation, Canon Bonney must 
resign his belief in the Fall of Adam ; with his 
belief in the Fall of Adam he must surrender 
the doctrine of the Atonement, as connected 
with that event, and thus relieve conscience of 
the strain put upon it in struggling to recon- 
cile vicarious punishment with our sense of 
justice. He will also have to lay aside his 
belief in the Serpent of the Temptation, and in 
the primeval personality of Evil. 

In Lux Mundi^ a collection of essays edited 
by the Reverend Principal of Pusey House, 
and understood to emanate from the High 
Church quarter, we find plain indications that 
the unhistoric character, so frankly recognized 
by the learned Canon in the opening chapters 
of Genesis, is recognized in other parts of Old 
Testament history by High Churchmen, who, 
having studied recent criticism, feel like the 
Canon, that there is a millstone to be cast off. 



THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 51 

One of these essayists admits that the "battle 
of historical record cannot be fought on the 
field of the Old Testament as it can on that of 
the New " ; that " very little of the early 
record can be securely traced to a period near 
the events"; and that "the Church cannot 
insist upon the historical character of the earli- 
est records of the ancient church in detail as 
she can on the historical character of the Gos- 
pels or the Acts of the Apostles." The same 
writer seems ready to entertain the view that 
the "books of Chronicles represent a later 
and less historical version of Israel's history 
than that given in Samuel and Kings," and that 
they "represent the version of that history which 
had become current in the priestly schools." 
" Conscious perversion " he will not acknow- 
ledge, but in the theory of " unconscious idealiz- 
ing" of history he is willing, apparently, to 
acquiesce. Inspiration, he thinks, is consistent 
with this sort of "idealizing," though it 
excludes conscious deception or pious fraud. 
Conscious deception or pious fraud no large- 
minded and instructed critic of primeval records 
would be inclined to charge. But "ideal" is 



52 THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 

apparently only another name for " mythical," 
and it is difficult to see how myths can in any 
sense be inspired, or why, if the records are in 
any sense inspired, the Church should not be 
able to insist on their historical character. " In 
detail " is a saving expression ; but the details 
make up the history, and if the truth of the 
details cannot be guaranteed, what is our guar- 
antee for the truth of the whole ? Human testi- 
mony, no doubt, may sometimes fail in minor 
particulars, while in the main account of the 
matter it is true. But is it conceivable that 
the Holy Spirit, in dictating the record of God's 
dealings with mankind for our instruction in 
the way of life, should simulate the defects of 
human evidence ? 

A veil which in all the orthodox Churches 
hung before the eyes of free inquiry when 
they were turned on the origin and estate of 
man is removed by the Canon's renuncia- 
tions. The present writer, as a student at 
college, attended the lectures of Dr. Buck- 
land, a pioneer in geology; and he remem- 
bers the desperate shifts to which the lecturer 
was driven in his efforts to reconcile the facts 



THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 53 

of his science with the Mosaic cosmogony, 
the literal truth of which he did not venture 
to impugn. By a " day " Dr. Buckland said, 
Moses meant a geological period, though the 
text says that each day was made up of a 
morning and an evening, while the Deca- 
logue fixes the sense by enjoining the observ- 
ance of the seventh day as that on which 
the Creator rested after the six days' labour 
of creation. How the professor dealt with 
fossil records of geological races and the 
appearance of death in the world before the 
fall of man, the writer does not now remem- 
ber. It is not very long since a preacher 
before an educated audience could meet the 
objection to the Mosaic deluge arising from 
the position of stones in the mountains of 
Auvergne, which such a cataclysm must have 
swept away, by the simple expedient of af- 
firming that when the deluge was over, the 
stones had been restored to their places by 
miracle. Nay, were not Mr. Gladstone's great 
intellectual powers the other day exerted to 
prove that the Creator, in dictating to Moses 
the account of the creation, had come won- 



54 THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 

derfuUy near the scientific truth and almost 
anticipated the nebular hypothesis? 

That the Bible does not teach science apol- 
ogists are now ready to proclaim. But the 
fact is that it does teach science, — cosmo- 
gonical science at least, — and that its teach- 
ings have been disproved. 

From the conceptions of science, geocen- 
tricism, derived from the Mosaic cosmogony, 
may have been banished, but over those of 
theology its cloud still heavily hangs. The 
consecrated impression has survived the dis- 
tinct belief, and faith shrinks from the theo- 
logical revolution which the abandonment of 
the impression would involve. 

Faith takes refuge in the substitution of fig- 
urative and symbolical for literal truth. This 
is Origen over again with his system of alle- 
gorical interpretation as a universal solvent of 
moral difficulties in Scripture. The refuge is 
surely little better than a subterfuge. The 
writer of a primeval narrative, unconscious of 
astronomy, geology, or physiology, believed in 
the literal truth of his legend. He had no 
idea of allegory or symbol. When he said 



THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 55 

six days of creation, he meant days and not 
aeons. Paradise, the Trees of Life and Know- 
ledge, the intercourse of God in human form 
with men, the Fall, the longevity of the patri- 
archs, the Noachic deluge, the miraculous ori- 
gin of the rainbow, were to him literal facts. 
If it was from the Holy Spirit that these 
narratives emanated, how can the Holy Spirit 
have failed to let mankind know that in real- 
ity they were allegories ? How could it allow 
them to be received as literal truths, to mis- 
lead the world for ages, to bar the advance of 
science, and, when science at last prevailed, to 
discredit revelation by the exposure ? Besides, 
to maintain the symbolical truths of Genesis, 
is almost as hard as to maintain its literal 
truth. What symbolical truth is there in the 
order of creation now disproved by science, or 
in the description of the cosmic system and 
the relations of the sun and moon to our 
planet? What symbolic truth is there in the 
Fall of Man, and how does it designate the 
rise of man from the brute, which science 
shows him originally to have been, to the leY^l 
of civilized humanity ? 



56 THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 

The history of every nation begins with 
myth. A primeval tribe keeps no record, and 
a nation in its maturity has no more recollec- 
tion of what happened in its infancy than a 
man of what happened to him in his cradle. 
It is needless to say that the first book of 
Livy is a tissue of fable, though the Romans 
were great keepers of records and very matter- 
of-fact as a people. When the age of reflec- 
tion arrives and the nation begins to speculate 
on its origin, it gives itself a mythical founder, 
a Theseus, a Romulus, or an Abraham, and 
ascribes to him its ancestral institutions or cus- 
toms. In his history also are found the keys 
to immemorial names and the origin of myste- 
rious or venerated objects, the Ruminal Fig- 
tree or the tomb of Abraham. It is a rule 
of criticism that we cannot by any critical 
alembic extract materials for history out of 
fable. If the details of a story are fabulous, 
so is the whole. If the details of Abraham's 
story — the appearances of the Deity to him, 
so strangely anthropomorphic, the miraculous 
birth of his son when his wife was ninety years 
old, his adventures with Sarah in Egypt and 



THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 57 

afterwards in Gerar, evidently two versions of 
the same legend, the sacrifice of his son ar- 
rested by the angel, with the episode of Lot, 
the destruction of the Cities of the Plain, and 
the turning of Lot's wife into a pillar of salt ^ 
— are plainly unhistorical, the whole story must 
be relegated to the domain of tribal fancy. 
We cannot make a real personage out of un- 
realities or fix a place for him in unrecorded 
time. 

That the alleged record is of a date posterior 
by many centuries to the events, and there- 
fore no record at all, plainly appears from the 
mention of Kings of Israel in Genesis (xxxvi. 
31). No reason has been shown for suppos- 
ing that the passage is an interpolation, while 
the suggestion that it is prophetic is extrava- 
gant. It stamps the date of the book, like 

1 In the case of the metamorphosis of Lot's wife, we have 
the origin of the legend still clearly before us in the pillars 
or needles of salt, at Usdum, near the southwest corner of 
the Dead Sea, which sometimes bear a resemblance to the 
human form. The natural peculiarities of the Dead Sea 
region are pretty evidently the source of this whole circle 
of legend. — See Andrew D. White's most interesting work. 
The Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom^ Vol. 
II., chap, xviii. 



58 THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 

the mention of the death of Moses in Deu- 
teronomy, to get rid of which efforts equally 
desperate are made. The words of Genesis 
xii. 6, "the Canaanite was then in the land," 
show that the book was written when the 
Canaanite had long disappeared, and the words 
of Deuteronomy xxxiv. 10, " there arose not a 
prophet in Israel since like unto Moses," imply 
that the book was written after the rise of a 
line of other prophets. Moreover the writer 
always speaks of Moses in the third person. 
These things were noticed by critics long ago, 
but the eyes of faith, in England and America 
at least, have been shut. The canon of Sir 
George Cornewall Lewis, limiting the trust- 
worthiness of oral tradition to a single cen- 
tury, may be too rigid ; but we certainly 
cannot trust oral tradition for such a period 
as that between the call of Abraham and the 
Kings, especially when, the alleged events 
being miraculous, an extraordinary amount of 
evidence is necessary to justify belief. 

The figure of the patriarch Abraham, a typi- 
cal sheikh, as well as the father of Israel, is 
exceptionally vivid, and his history is excep- 



THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 59 

tionally dramatic. It is needless to say that 
the narrative contains episodes of striking 
beauty, such as the meeting of the steward 
with Rebekah, the scene of Hagar and her 
child nearly perishing in the wilderness, and 
the sacrifice of Isaac. But to regard Abra- 
ham as a real founder, not only of a nation, 
but of the Church, and as the chosen medium 
of communication between God and man, 
sound criticism will no longer allow us; and 
sound criticism, like genuine science, is the 
voice of the Spirit of Truth. A writer in 
Lux Mundi^ already quoted, avows his belief 
that "the modern development of historical 
criticism is reaching results as sure, where 
it is fairly used, as scientific inquiry." He 
significantly reminds churchmen of the warn- 
ing conveyed by the name of Galileo. Why 
should we any longer cling to that which, ^"^'' 
whatever it may have been to the men of a 
primeval tribe, is to us a low and narrow con- ,;,.^ 
ception of the Deity ? Why should we force 
ourselves to believe that a Being who fills 
eternity and infinity became the guest of a 
Hebrew sheikh; entered into a covenant with " 



60 THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 

the sheikh's tribe, to the exclusion of the rest 
of the human race; and as the seal of the 
covenant ordained the perpetuation of a bar- 
barous tribal rite ? There have been bibli- 
olaters so extreme as to wish even converted 
Jews to continue the practice to which the 
promise was mysteriously annexed. Tribalism 
may attach inordinate value to genealogies 
as well as to ancestral rites, but can we im- 
agine the Author of the universe limiting his 
providential regard and his communication of 
vital truth to his creatures by tribal lines ? 
Every tribe is the chosen people of its own 

\ god ; enjoys a monopoly of his favour ; is up- 
held by him against the interest of other na- 

^ tions, and especially protected by him in war. 

- It is he who gives it victory, and if stones 
fall or are hurled on the enemy retreating 
through a rocky pass, it is he who casts them 
down (Joshua x. 11). Christianity is the 
denial of Jewish tribalism, proclaiming that 
all nations have been made of one blood to 

I dwell together on the earth, and are sharers 

I alike in the care of Providence. Of the bad 
effects of a conception of God drawn from the 



THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 61 

imagination of Jewish tribalism, the least is 
the waste of money and effort in desperate 
attempts to convert the Jews. 

Of the history of the other patriarchs the 
texture is apparently the same as that of 
the history of Abraham. They are mythical 
fathers of a race, a character which extends 
to Ishmael and Esau. In fact the chapters 
relating to them are full of what, in an ordi- 
nary case, would be called ethnological myth. 
Of contemporary or anything like contem- 
porary record, even supposing the Pentateuch 
to have been written by Moses, there can be 
no pretence. It is thus in the absence of 
anything like evidence that we have been 
called upon to accept such incidents as the 
bodily wrestling of Jehovah with Jacob, and 
the appearance to Jacob in a dream of an 
angel who is the organ of a supernatural com- 
munication about the speckles of the rams or 
he-goats. Most picturesque and memorable, 
no doubt, are the characters of Esau, the typi- 
cal father of the hunter tribe, and of Jacob, 
in whose unscrupulous and successful cunning 
we have a picture such as the anti-Semite 



62 THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 

would now draw of liis enemy, the financial 
I Jew. These chapters are full of legends con- 
nected with fanciful interpretations of names, 
such as Jehovah-Jireh (Genesis xxii. 14) ; 
fanciful accounts of immemorial monuments, 
such as Jacob's pillar ; or of tribal customs, 
such as that of refraining from a particular 
sinew because it had been touched and made 
to shrink by Jehovah in wrestling with Jacob. 
Extraordinary simplicity is surely displayed 
by the commentators who appeal to the 
custom as evidence of the historic event. 

Much labour has been spent in efforts to 
identify the Pharaoh of the Exodus and to fix 
the date of that event and its connection 
with Egyptian history. Still more labour has 
been spent in tracing the route of the Israel- 
ites through the wilderness and explaining 
away the tremendous difficulties of the narra- 
*^ tive. What if the whole is mythical ? There 
is a famine in Palestine. The patriarch sends 
his ten sons, each with an ass and a sack, 
across the desert to buy food in Egypt. Pro- 
visions must have been furnished them for 
their journey, and of what they bought they 



THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 63 

must have consumed not a little on their 
journey home. This seems improbable, nor 
was it very likely that the ten should strike 
the exact place where their brother Joseph 
was in power. Of the poetic character of 
the story of Joseph, with its miraculous 
dreams and their interpretations, there surely 
can be no doubt. Yet upon the story of 
Joseph and his brethren the whole history of 
the captivity in Egypt and the Exodus ap- 
parently hangs. We might almost renounce 
the task of analyzing the rest of the nar- 
rative — the attempt of the Egyptian rulers 
to extirpate the Hebrews by the strange com- 
mand to the midwives when they might have 
taken a shorter and surer course ; the contest 
in thaumaturgy between the magicians of 
Jehovah and those of Egypt ; the plagued 
sent upon the helpless people of Egypt to 
make their ruler do that which Omnipotence 
might at once have done by its fiat ; the ex- >%- 

traordinary multiplication of the Hebrews, 
whose adult males, in spite of the destruction 
of their male children, amount to six hundred 
thousand, a number which implies a total 



64 THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 

population of more than two millions ; their 
sudden appearance as an armed host though 
they had just been represented as the unresist- 
ing bondsmen of the Egyptians ; their wander- 
ings for forty years within the narrow limits 
of the Sinaitic peninsula, where, though the 
region is desert, they find food and water 
not only for themselves but for their innu- 
merable flocks and herds ; their construction 
of a sumptuous tabernacle where materials 
or artificers for it could not have been 
found ; the plague of fiery serpents which 
was sent among them and the brazen serpent 
by looking on which they were healed ; the 
miraculous destruction of the impious oppo- 
nents of an exclusive priesthood ; the giants 
of Canaan ; the victories gained over native 
tribes by the direct interposition of Heaven ; 
the strange episode of Balaam and his collo- 
quy with his ass ; the stopping of the sun 
and moon that Israel might have time for 
the pursuit and slaughter of his enemies. 
This last incident alone seems enough to 
stamp the legendary character of the whole. 
In vain we attempt to reduce the miracle, 



THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 65 

which would imply a disturbance of the 
entire solar system, to a mere prolongation of 
the daylight. The Old Testament is al- 
together geocentric, and not merely in the 
phenomenal sense. The sun and moon are 
made "for lights in the firmament of the 
heaven to give light on the earth," and with 
them is coupled the creation of the stars. 
The writer of the book of Joshua cites the 
book of Jasher as evidence of the miracle. 
Was the book of Jasher inspired? Could an 
inspired writer need or rest on the evidence 
of one who was uninspired? 

Whether any sojourn of the Hebrews in 
Egypt or any real connection with that coun- 
try is denoted by the visit of Abraham to 
Egypt and afterwards by the story of the 
Exodus, it is for Egyptologists to determine. 
Nothing certainly Egyptian seems to be 
traceable in Hebrew beliefs or institutions. 
Of the appearance of Hebrew forms on Egyp- 
tian monuments, Egyptian conquest would 
appear to give a sufficient explanation. The 
history of the Exodus is connected with the 
account of the institution of the Passover, 



66 THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 

and analogy may lead us to surmise that 
national imagination has been busy in explain- 
ing the origin of an immemorial rite. 

As to the date and sources of the Penta- 
teuch and the other historical books there is 
a flux of learned hypothesis. But the ques- 
tions of what documentary materials a book 
was composed, and whether it was composed 
in the reign of Josiah or at the time of the 
captivity, do not concern us here. It is 
enough that the book has no pretension to 
authenticity or to a date within many cen- 
turies of the events. Let it be observed that 
the Church still tenders the Pentateuch to the 
people as the books of Moses, though a 
learned churchman will now hardly be found 
to maintain that Moses was the writer. 

We are, then, in no way bound to believe 
that God so identified himself with a fa- 
voured tribe as to license it to invade a num- 
ber of other tribes which had done it no 
wrong, to slaughter them and take possession 
of their land. We are in no way bound to 
believe that he, by the mouth of Moses, re- 
buked his chosen people for saving alive the 



THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 67 

women and children of the Midianites and 
bade them kill every male among the little 
ones and every woman that had known man 
(Numbers xxxi. 17) ; or that he commanded 
them to slay, not only man, woman, and 
child, but the dumb animals, everything that 
breathed, in a captured city. To the objec- 
tions raised by humanity against the slaughter 
of the Canaanites, Christian apologists have 
made various and, as one of their number 
admits, not very consistent replies. While 
Bishop Butler holds that divine command in 
itself constituted morality, Mozley, the But- 
ler of our day, holds that the divine command 
could not constitute morality had not the 
general morality of the people been on that 
level. Some say that in conquering Canaan 
the Israelites did but recover their own, a 
plea which, even if it had not been ousted 
by prescription, would be totally inconsistent 
with the account of the sojourning of Abra- 
ham and of his purchase of a plot of land. 
Others maintain that, having been driven by 
force from Egypt, they had a right to help 
themselves to a home where they could find 



6S THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 

it, and to put all the existing inhabitants to 
the sword. The bequest of Noah is also 
pleaded. But at last the apologist has to 
fall back upon the simple command of the 
Almighty, which is justified on the ground 
that the Canaanites were idolaters, they never 
having heard of the true God. 

Such examples as the slaughter of the 
Canaanites, the killing of Sisera, the assassi- 
nation of Eglon, the hewing of Agag in 
pieces by Samuel before the Lord, Elijah's 
massacre of the prophets of Baal, the hang- 
ing of Haman with his ten sons commem- 
orated in the hideous feast of Purim, have, 
it is needless to say, had a deplorable effect 
in forming the harsher and darker parts of 
the character which calls itself Christian. 
They are responsible in no small degree for 
murderous persecutions, and for the extirpa- 
tion or oppression of heathen races. The dark 
side of the Puritan character in particular is 
traceable to their influence. Macaulay men- 
tions a fanatical Scotch Calvinist whose writ- 
ings, he says, hardly bear a trace of acquaint- 
ance with the New Testament. Scotch Cal- 



THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 69 

vinism itself has in fact ethically in it not a 
little of the Old Testament. 

Jael, when she decoyed her husband's ally 
into her tent and slew him while he was rest- 
ing trustfully beneath it, broke in the most 
signal manner the sacred rule of Arab hospi- 
tality, as well as the ordinary moral law. 
The comment of orthodoxy upon this is : " If 
we can overlook the treachery and violence 
which belong to the age and country, and 
bear in mind Jael's ardent sympathies with 
the oppressed people of God, her faith in the 
right of Israel to possess the land in which 
they were now slaves, her zeal for the glory 
of Jehovah as against the gods of Canaan, and 
the heroic courage and firmness with which she 
executed her deadly purpose, we shall be ready 
to yield to her the praise which is her due."^ 
The extenuating motives supplied by the com- 
mentator are not to be found in the text. To 
reconcile us to the assassination of Eglon, a 
distinction is drawn between God's providential 
order and his moral law, the providential order 
ordaining what the moral law would forbid, 
I The Speaker's Commentary ^ ad loc. 



70 THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 

Perhaps nothing in the Old Testament is 
more instinct with fanatical tribalism or more 
revolting than the praise of Rahab, the harlot 
of Jericho, who secretes the spies of the rob- 
ber tribe which is coming to destroy her 
country, and who, though a traitress, has a 
place of honour as a heroine in one of the 
genealogies of Jesus. 

The writer heard the other day a very 
beautiful Christian sermon on the purity of 
heart in virtue of which good men see God. 
But the lesson of the day, read before that 
sermon, was the history of Jehu. Jehu, a 
usurper, begins by murdering Joram, the son 
of his master Ahab, king of Israel, and 
Ahaziah, the king of Judah, neither of whom 
had done him any wrong. He then has Jeze- 
bel, Ahab's widow, killed by her own servants. 
Next he suborns the guardians and tutors of 
Ahab's seventy sons in Samaria to murder 
the children committed to their care and 
send the seventy heads to him in baskets to 
be piled at the gate of the city. Then he 
butchers the brethren of Ahaziah, king of 
Judah, with whom he falls in on the road, 



THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 71 

two and forty in number, for no specified or 
apparent crime. On his arrival at Samaria 
there is more butchery. Finally he entraps 
all the worshippers of Baal, by an invitation 
to a solemn assembly, and massacres them 
to a man. At the end of this series of 
atrocities the Lord is made to say to him, 
" Because thou hast done well in executing 
that which is right in mine eyes and hast 
done unto the house of Ahab all that was in 
my heart, thy children unto the fourth gen- 
eration shall sit on the throne of Israel." 
Jehu had undoubtedly done what was in the 
heart of the Jehovist party and right in its 
eyes. But between the sensuality of the 
Baalite and the sanguinary zealotry of the 
Jehovist it might not have been very easy 
to choose. 

David is loyal, chivalrous, ardent in friend- 
ship, and combines with adventurous valour 
the tenderness which has led to our accept- 
ing him as the writer of some of the Psalms. 
So far, he is an object of our admiration, 
due allowance for time and circumstance 
being made. But he is guilty of murder and 



72 THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 

adultery, both in the first degree ; he puts to 
death with hideous tortures the people of a 
captured city ; on his death-bed he bequeaths 
to his son a murderous legacy of vengeance ; 
he exemplifies by his treatment of his ten 
concubines, whom he shuts up for life, the 
most cruel evils of polygamy (2 Samuel 
XX. 3). The man after God's own heart he 
might be deemed by a primitive priesthood 
to whose divinity he was always true ; but it 
is hardly possible that he should be so deemed 
by a moral civilization. Still less possible is 
it that we should imagine the issues of spirit- 
ual life to be so shut up that from this man's 
loins salvation would be bound to spring. 

The books of the Old Testament, and nota- 
bly the historical books, are for the most 
part by unknown authors and of unknown 
dates. That the early part of Genesis is 
made up of two narratives, the Elohistic, in 
which the name of God is Elohim, and the 
Jehovistic, in which the name is Jehovah, all 
experts are now agreed, and even the un- 
learned reader may verify the fact. A com- 
bination of two narratives is still traceable in 



THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 73 

the history of Abraham and his son. That 
in the account of the creation and the flood, 
Assyrian legend is the basis on which the 
Hebrew built a more monotheistic and sub- 
limer story, is the opinion of writers who still 
deem themselves orthodox and who apparently 
do not shrink from the hypothesis that the 
Deity in compiling an account of his own 
works was fain, as the basis of his narrative, 
to avail himself of an Assyrian legend. Docu- 
mentary analysis and the philosophy of his- 
tory combined have made it highly probable 
that writings, ascribed by our Bible to Moses, 
not only were not his, but were of a date as late 
as the Captivity. It is likely that the schools 
of the prophets played a great part, as did the 
monasteries of the Middle Ages, in composing 
the chronicles of the nation. The pensive- 
ness of the Captivity seems to pervade the 
Psalms. These, as has been already said, 
are matters at present of hypothesis, and 
though most interesting to the learned, little 
a,ffect the practical question whether the writ- 
ings ascribed to Moses should continue to be 
read in churches as authentic and inspired. 



74 THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 

That they are not authentic is certain. It is 
not less certain that by whomsoever, at what- 
ever time, and by whatever process they 
may have been produced, we are without an 
assignable reason for supposing them to be 
inspired. 

Nor do the Old Testament writers themselves 
put forward any claim to inspiration. Where 
they cite elder authorities, such as the book 
of Jasher, they in effect declare themselves 
indebted to human records, and therefore un- 
inspired. Preachers, especially preachers of 
reform, speak in the name of Heaven. Ori- 
ental and primitive preachers speak as the 
inspired organs of Heaven. The prophets, 
whose name, with its modern connotation, is 
scarcely more appropriate than it would be if 
applied to Savonarola or John Wesley, are in 
this respect like others of their class. One of 
them when bidden to prophesy calls for a 
minstrel, under the influence of whose strains 
the hand of the Lord comes upon him (2 Kings 
iii. 15 ; see also 1 Samuel x. 5). All seers, 
as their name imports, have visions. Primitive 
lawgivers speak by divine command. In no 



THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 75 

other way, apparently, is inspiration claimed 
by the authors of the Old Testament. 

Jesus came to substitute a religion of con- v 
science for that of law, a religion of humanity .. 
for that of a race, worship in spirit and in \ 
truth for worship in the temple. His preach- ^. 
ing was a reaction against the Judaism then 
impersonated in the Pharisee, afterwards de- 
veloped in the Talmud, and now fully repre- 
sented in the Talmudic Jew. But he was not 
a revolutionist. Like Socrates, he accepted 
established institutions, including the national 
ritual, and in that sense fulfilled all righteous- 
ness. Nor was he, on any hypothesis as to 
his nature, a critic or concerned with any 
critical objections to the sacred books. Ad- 
dressing an audience which believed in them, 
he cited them and appealed to their authority 
in the usual way. He cites the book of Jonah, 
and in terms which seem to show that he 
regards it as a real history ; so that a literalist, 
like the late Dr. Liddon, took fire at being told 
that the book was an apologue, considering this 
an impeachment of the veracity of Jesus. Yet 
few, even of the most orthodox, would now pro- 



76 THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 

fess to believe that Jonah sojourned in the belly 
of a fish. St. Paul in like manner treats the 
narrative of the fall of Adam in Genesis as 
historical and connects a doctrine with it, 
though the mythical character of the narrative 
is admitted, as we have seen, even by a digni- 
tary of the Church. 

The Evangelists, simple-minded, find in the 
sacred books of their nation prognostications 
of the character and mission of Jesus. Some- 
times, as critical examination shows, a little 
has been enough to satisfy their uncritical 
minds (see Matthew ii. 18 ; xxi. 5). But 
surely it is something like a platitude to as- 
cribe to them such an idea of Old Testament 
prophecy as is worked out for us by Keith 
and other modern divines. No real and specific 
prediction of the advent of Jesus, or of any 
event in his life, can be produced from the 
books of the Old Testament. At most we 
find passages or phrases which are capable of 
a spiritual application, and in that metaphorical 
sense prophetic. Even of the famous passage 
in the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah, if it is read 
without strong prepossessions, no more than 
this can be said. 



THE CMUttCH AlTD THE OLD TESTAMENT Tt 

Beyond contest and almost beyond com- 
pare is the beauty, spiritual as well as lyri- 
cal, of some of the Psalms. But there are 
others which it is shocking to hear a Chris- 
tian congregation reciting, still more shock- 
ing, perhaps, to hear it chanting in a church. 
To wish that your enemy's wife may be a 
widow, and that his children may be father- 
less and have none to pity them, is oriental. 
To wish that his prayer may be turned to 
sin and that Satan may stand at his right 
hand, to wish in short for his spiritual ruin, 
is surely oriental and something more. The 
writer in Imx Mundi, already cited, would 
persuade himself and us that these utter- 
ances are not those of personal spite, but 
"the claim which righteous Israel makes 
upon God that he should vindicate himself 
and let her eyes see how righteousness turns 
again to judgment." This is the way in 
which we have been led by our traditional 
belief in the inspiration of the Old Testament 
to play fast and loose with our understand- 
ings and with our moral sense. It might 
almost as well be pretended, when the Greek 



7^ THiB CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 

poet Theognis longs to drink the blood of 
his political enemies, that he is not actuated 
by hatred, but has some great moral object 
in his mind. 

What is the Old Testament ? It is the 
entire body of Hebrew literature, theology, 
philosophy, history, fiction, and poetry, in- 
cluding the poetry of love as well as that of 
religion. We have bound it all up together 
as a single book, and bound up that book 
with the New Testament, as though the 
religion of the two were the same and the 
slaughter of the Canaanites or the massacre 
of the day of Purim were a step towards 
Christian brotherhood and the Sermon on 
the Mount. We have forcibly turned He- 
brew literature into a sort of cryptogram 
of Christianity. The love-song called the 
Song of Solomon has been turned into a 
cryptographic description of the union of 
Christ with his Church. A certain divine, 
when his advice was asked about the method 
of reading the Scriptures, used to say that 
his method was to begin at the beginning 
and read to the end; so that he would spend 



THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 79 

three hours at least on the Old Testament 
for one that he spent on the New, and would 
read the list of the Dukes of Edom as often 
as he read the Sermon on the Mount. The 
first step towards a rational appreciation of 
the Old Testament is to break up the vol- 
ume, separate the acts of Joshua or Jehu 
from the teachings of Jesus, and the differ- 
ent books of the Old Testament from each 
other. This has been done long since, men- 
tally at least, by the critic ; but it has not 
been done by the churches. Nor have the 
churches ceased to ascribe the Pentateuch 
to Moses, the book of Daniel to Daniel, and 
both parts of Isaiah to the same prophet. 

"We are told in the book of Joshua (xxiv. 2) 
that the ancestors of Abraham served other 
gods. How, or by what influences, whether 
those of individual reformers like the prophets 
or of general circumstance, the nation was 
raised from its primeval worship to tribal 
monotheism of an eminently pure and exalted 
type, seems to be a historical mystery. Higher 
than to tribal monotheism it did not rise ; at 
least, it advanced no further than to the belief 



80 THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 

that its God was superior in power as well as 
in character to all other gods, and thus Lord 
of the whole earth. Its God was still the 
God of Israel, and the Jews were still his 
chosen people. Nor did it wholly get rid of 
localism. Jerusalem was still the abode of 
God when Jesus, according to the fourth 
Gospel, announced to the woman of Samaria 
the abolition of local religion. Judaism, 
therefore, never reached the religious ele- 
vation of some chosen spirits among the 
heathen world, such as Seneca, Marcus 
Aurelius, and Epictetus ; although the Jew- 
ish belief was more intense than that of the 
philosophers and extended not only to a 
select circle but to a portion at least of the 
people. 

Nor could the Jew, hampered as he was 
by lingering tribalism, form a conception of 
the universality and majesty of divine gov- 
ernment in the form of moral law such as 
we find in Plato or in Cicero. There is 
nothing in the Hebrew writings like a pas- 
sage in Cicero's Republic^ preserved by Lac- 
tantius : " There is a true law, right reason, 



THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 81 

in unison with nature, all-embracing, consist- 
ent, and eternal, which, by its commands, 
calls to duty, by its prohibitions deters from 
crime, which, however, never addresses to 
the good its commands or its prohibitions 
in vain, nor by command or prohibition 
moves the wicked. This law cannot be 
amended, nor can any clause of it be re- 
pealed, nor can it be abrogated as a whole. 
By no vote either of the Senate or of the 
people can we be released from it. It re- 
quires none to explain or to interpret it. 
Nor will there be one law at Rome and 
another at Athens ; one now and another 
hereafter. For all nations and for all time 
there will be one law, immutable and eter- 
nal; there will be a common master and 
ruler of all, — God, the f ramer, exponent, and 
enactor of this law, whom he who fails to 
obey will be recreant to himself, and, re- 
nouncing human nature, will, by that very 
fact, incur the severest punishment, even 
though he should escape other penalties real 
or supposed. "1 Equally broad is the lan- 
^Divin. Instit, VI., 8. 



82 THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 

guage of the De Legihus: "Since, then, noth- 
ing is superior to reason, whether in God or 
man, it is by partnership in reason, above 
all, that man is connected with God. Part- 
nership in reason is partnership in right 
reason ; and as law is right reason, law 
again is a bond between God and man. 
Community of law is community of right. 
Those to whom these things are common 
are citizens of the same commonwealth. If 
men obey the same power and rule, much 
more do they obey this celestial code, the 
divine mind and the supreme power of God. 
So that we must regard this universe as 
one and a single commonwealth of gods and 
men. And whereas in states, on a prin- 
ciple of which we will speak in the proper 
place, the position of the citizen is marked 
by his family ties, in the universal nature of 
things we have something more august and 
glorious, the bond of kinship between gods 
and men."i 

Of a belief in the immortality of the soul no 
evidence can be found in the Old Testament, 
1 De Leg., I., 7. 



THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 83 

though readers of the Bible who continue to 
use the unrevised version may remain under 
the impression that the doctrine is found in 
Job. Sheol is merely, like the Hades of the 
Odyssey, a shadowy abode of the dead. Had 
the doctrine of a resurrection been proclaimed 
in the Mosaic books, it could hardly have been 
denied by the Sadducees ; its acceptance by 
the Pharisees was a speculation of their school. 
In Ezekiel xviii. life is held out as the re- 
ward of those who do well ; death is the pen- 
alty of those who do evil. But the ''life," for 
all that appears, is temporal, though the Chris- 
tian, by reading into it immortality, may apply 
the chapter to his own use. Enoch and Elijah 
are represented as translated to heaven, not as 
living after death, nor is it said that the appari- 
tion of Samuel called up by the witch of Endor 
was the spirit of Samuel himself ; it appears 
rather to have been like the apparitions sum- 
moned by the witches in Macbeth. The re- 
wards and punishments of the Old Testament 
are temporal and material ; its rewards are 
wealth and offspring, its punishments are beg- 
gary and childlessness. The only immortality 



84 THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 

of which it speaks is the perpetuation of a 
man's family in his tribe. The vindication 
and requital of Job's virtue are added wealth 
and multiplied offspring. Nor do we find in 
the Old Testament that moral immortality, if 
the expression may be used, which is found in 
Greek and Roman philosophers, who, without 
speaking definitely of a life after death, identify 
the virtuous man with the undying power of 
virtue and intimate that it will be well with 
him in the sum of things. 

Not assuredly that the Hebrew literature 
lacks qualities, irrespective of its dogmatic posi- 
tion, such as may well account for the hold 
which it has retained, in spite of its primeval 
cosmogony, theology, or morality, on the alle- 
giance of civilized minds. The sublimity of its 
cosmogony impressed, as we know, Longinus. 
Voltaire himself could hardly have failed to 
acknowledge the magnificence of some parts of 
the prophetic writings, though in other parts 
he might find marks for his satire. All must 
be touched by the beauty of the story of Joseph 
and of the book of Ruth. Admirable, we repeat, 
are both the religious and the lyrical excel- 



THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 85 

lence of some of the Psalms. The histories are 
marred by tribalism, primeval inhumanity, and 
fanaticism ; but they derive dignity as well as 
unity from the continuous purpose which runs 
through them, and which in the main is moral ; 
since Jehovah was a God of righteousness and 
purity, in contrast with the gods of other tribes. 
His worship, though ritual, sacrificial, and un- 
like the worship "in spirit and in truth," the 
advent of which was proclaimed to the woman 
of Samaria, was yet spiritual compared with 
that of deities whose votaries gashed them- 
selves with knives or celebrated lascivious 
orgies beneath the sacred tree. 

Hebrew law is primitive, and the idea of 
reviving it, conceived by some of the Puritans, 
was absurd. But it is an improvement in 
primitive law. It makes human life sacred, 
treating murder as a crime to be punished with 
death, not as a mere injury to be compounded 
by a fine. It recognizes the avenger of blood, 
the rude minister of justice before the insti- 
tution of police ; but it confines his office to 
the case of wilful murder, and forbids heredi- 
tary blood-feuds. It recognizes asylum, a nee- 



86 THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 

essary check on wild primeval passion, but 
confines it to accidental homicide, ordaining 
that if a man slay his neighbour with guile, 
he shall be taken, even from the altar, and 
put to death. It recognizes the father's power 
of life and death over his child, patria potestas 
as the Roman called it, but unlike the hideous 
Roman law, it requires public procedure and 
a definite charge, while it secures mercy by 
requiring the concurrence of the mother. It 
recognizes polygamy, but strives to temper the 
jealousies and injustice of the harem. It is 
comparatively hospitable and liberal in its 
treatment of the stranger. Its Sabbath was 
most beneficent, especially to the slave, and 
strict formality was essential to observance 
among primitive people. Ordeal is confined 
to the particular case of a wife suspected of 
infidelity, and divination is forbidden save 
by the Urim and Thummim. The law miti- 
gates the customs of war, requiring that a city 
shall be summoned before it is besieged, and 
forbidding the cutting down of the fruit trees 
in a hostile country, which was regularly prac- 
tised by the Greeks ; while the female captive. 



THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 87 

instead of being dragged at once to the bed of 
the captor, is allowed a month of mourning. 
Nor is war exalted or encouraged, as it was 
among the Assyrians and the Persians. Ser- 
vice is to be voluntary ; captains are to be 
chosen only when the army takes the field, so 
that there would be no military class ; horses 
and chariots are not to be multiplied. Jeho- 
vah, though a God of battles, is not char- 
acteristically so. Not victory in war, but 
peace, is the normal blessing. Kings it was 
expected the Israelites would have, like the 
nations around them. But unlike the kings 
of the nations around them, their king was 
to be the choice of the nation ; he was to be 
under the law, which he was to study that 
his heart might not be lifted up among his 
brethren ; and his luxury, his harem, his accu- 
mulation of treasure, and his military estab- 
lishment were to be kept within bounds. 
Finally, while there was to be a priestly order, 
that order was not to be a caste. The Levites 
were to be ordained by the laying on of the 
hands of the whole assembly of Israel. Nor, 
while the ritual was consigned to the priest- 



88 THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 

hood, was religious teaching confined to them ; 
its organs were the prophet and the psalmist. 
Worship was sacrificial, and all sacrifice is 
irrational, but there was no human sacrifice, 
and the scape-goat was a goat, not, as among 
the polished Athenians, a man. The Ameri- 
can slave-owner could appeal to the Old Testa- 
ment as a warrant for his institution. Slavery 
there was everywhere in primitive times, but 
the Hebrew slave-law is more merciful than 
that either of Greece or Rome, notwithstand- 
ing the ordinance, shocking to our sense, which 
held the master blameless for killing his slave 
if death was not immediate, on the ground that 
the slave "was his money." ^ The belief in 
witchcraft as a crime to be punished by death 
is also accepted as true, and, though not promi- 
nent, gave birth in misguided Christendom to 
an almost incredible series of atrocities. How 

1 An essay written by the author on the question *' Does 
the Bible Sanction American Slavery?" has probably been 
long since forgotten. In its line of argument against slavery 
as an anachronistic and immoral revival of a primitive and 
once moral institution it was consistent with the present 
paper. But the essay was written in the penumbra of ortho- 
doxy and would now require very great modification. 



THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 89 

far these ordinances or any of them actually 
took effect we cannot say. Probably they 
were to a great extent speculative and ideal. 
The ordinance against cutting down the fruit 
trees in an enemy's country certainly was not 
observed, for the fruit trees of the Moabites 
are cut down, Elisha giving the word (2 Kings 
iii. 19). The agricultural polity of family 
freeholds, reverting to the family in the year 
of jubilee, may safely be said to have never 
come into practical existence, but to have 
been the ideal Republic of some very Hebrew 
Plato. Nor was the court or the harem of 
Solomon limited by any jealous regulations. 

From the social point of view, perhaps 
the most notable passages of the Old Testa- 
ment are those rebuking the selfishness of 
wealth and the oppression of the poor in the 
prophetic writings and the Psalms, which have 
supplied weapons for the champions of social 
justice. There is scarcely anything like these 
in Greek or Roman literature. Juvenal com- 
plains of the contempt and insult to which 
poverty exposes a man, but he does not de- 
nounce social oppression. In this respect the 



90 THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 

Mahometan and the Buddhist are perhaps 
superior to the Greek or Roman. But we 
shall hardly find anywhere a moral force equal 
in intensity to that of the Hebrew prophets, 
narrowly local and national though their 
preaching is. 

In forming an estimate of Hebrew litera- 
ture we may have still to be upon our guard 
against a lingering belief in the inspired char- 
acter of the books which is apt to betray itself 
in a somewhat unbounded admiration. Much 
in the prophets surely is rhapsody to which in- 
tense self -excitement might give birth. Of the 
history we have only the prophet's version, and 
if the other side had spoken, complaints of 
gloomy and oppressive fanaticism might have 
been heard. It was hardly well that modern 
religion and life should take their colour from 
a sombre struggle between Jehovah and Baal. 
.^^ There is in Hebrew literature comparatively 
little of tenderness or geniality, of humour 
nothing, unless it be the grotesque adventures 
of Samson among the Philistines. To the 
growth of science blind belief in the Old 
Testament, which represents each event of 



THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 91 

nature as the direct act of Jehovah, exclud- 
ing secondary causes, has been morally op- 
posed. Neither of science nor of art had the 
Jew any share ; and both defects make them- 
selves felt. 

Religion in the primitive state of man is 
identified with nationality. For a member of 
the tribe or of the nation, which inherited the 
religion of the tribe, to worship any but the 
tribal or national god or gods is treason pun- 
ishable by death. " He that sacrificeth unto 
any god save unto the Lord only he shall be 
utterly destroyed." To the importation of 
this feature of an obsolete tribalism into Chris- 
tianity, Christendom in part at least owes the 
fatal identification of the Church with the 
State, the extermination of the Albigenses, the 
religious wars, the Inquisition, the burning of 
Servetus. At the end of the seventeenth 
century a boy was put to death by the Cal- 
vinistic fanatics of Scotland for having blas- 
phemed the Lord by disparaging the dogma of 
the Trinity. Nor have we yet got rid of the 
shade cast over human life by superstitious 
use of a literature dark with struggles of 



92 THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 

religion or race, stern with denunciation, de- 
void of humour or playfulness, and seldom 
in touch with common humanity. 

We have been taught by philosophic apolo- 
gists to believe in Jewish history and legisla- 
tion as the education of a chosen people 
directed by the Almighty and leading them 
gradually from a low to a high morality, 
from fetishism or primitive superstition to 
monotheism, and from tribalism to humanity. 
This, as it recognizes a low beginning and a 
gradual improvement, is at all events a rational 
view compared with the common bibliolatry. 
But Jewish progress after all is only a segment, 

/ however momentous a segment, of the progress 
of civilization. There is nothing in it which 
denotes the exclusive action of deity. This, 
since a broader view has been taken of history, 
is almost universally acknowledged. Then the 
education thus designated as divine, — in what 
did it end ? In the Jews of Ezra, with their in- 

., tensified tribalism and self -estrangement from 
humanity, not only renouncing intermarriage 

..- with other races, but ruthlessly putting away 

. the wives, mothers, and children with whom 



THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 93 

they had been living ; in Pharisaism ; in cere- 
monialism, the most irrational and oppressive ; 
in Jewish angelology and demonology, the 
craziest of superstitions ; in the Talmud with 
its extravagant legalism and its unspeakable 
nonsense ; in the murder of the great Teacher 
of humanity and the rejection of his Gospel ; 
in the perpetuation of tribalism of the most 
hateful kind by a vast cosmopolitan race of 
usurers wandering over the world without a 
country, treating, in their pride of race, their 
fellowmen as gentiles and unclean, preying on 
all the nations, and inevitably hated by them 
all. 

If Jerusalem may be credited with Christian- 
ity as her final development, papal Kome may 
be credited with the religion of the Refor- 
mation. There is a continuity, there is an en- 
during element in both cases. The Sanhedrim 
understood Judaism, and when it yelled " Cru- 
cify him" it knew what the relation was be- 
tween its own religion and the teaching of 
Christ. 

That which is not a supernatural revelation 
may still, so far as it is good, be a manifestation 



^•' 



94 THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 

of the divine. As a manifestation of the 
divine the Hebrew books, teaching righteous- 
ness and purity, may keep their place in our 
love and admiration for ever ; while of their 
tribalism, their intolerance, their religious 
cruelty, we for ever take our leave. The time 
has surely come when as a supernatural reve- 
lation they should be frankly though reverently 
laid aside, and no more allowed to cloud the 
vision of free inquiry or to cast the shadow 
of primeval religion and law over our modern 
life. 

It surely is useless and paltering with the 
truth to set up, like the writer in Lux Mundi^ 
and other rationalistic apologists, the figment 
of a semi-inspiration. An inspiration which 
errs, which contradicts itself, which dictates 
manifest incredibilities, such as the stopping 
of the sun, Balaam's speaking ass, Elisha's 
avenging bears, or the transformation of Nebu- 
chadnezzar, is no inspiration at all. It requires 
the supplementary action of human criticism 
to winnow the divine from the human, the 
truth from the falsehood ; and the result of the 
process varies with the personal tendencies of 



THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 95 

the critics. The use of the phrase " inspiration " 
when the belief has really been abandoned is 
worse than weak ; it is Jesuitical, and will end 
as all Jesuitry must end. Those who try to 
break the fall of orthodoxy will only make the 
fall heavier at last. When we are told that 
there are in the Old Testament Scriptures both 
a human and a divine element, we must ask 
by what test the divine is to be distinguished 
from the human and proved to be divine. 
Nobody would ever have thought of "partial 
inspiration" except as an expedient to cover 
retreat. We do but tamper with our own 
understandings and consciences by such at- 
tempts at once to hold on and let go, to retain 
the shadow of the belief when the substance has 
passed away. Far better it is, whatever the 
effort may cost, honestly to admit that the 
sacred books of the Hebrews, granting their 
superiority to the sacred books of other nations, 
are, like the sacred books of other nations, the 
works of man and not of God. Compared with 
the semi-inspirationist, the believers in verbal 
inspiration, of whom some still remain, des- 
perate as are the difficulties with which they 



96 THE CBUKCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 

have to contend, stand upon firm ground. 
Verbal inspiration is at all events a consecrated 
tradition as well as a consistent view. Semi- 
inspiration is a subterfuge and nothing more. 

That the semi-inspiration theory is entirely- 
new and has sprung up to meet the inroads of 
destructive criticism, those who have embraced 
it do not deny. Yet Providence would surely 
have shown a curious indifference to its own 
ends if it had so constructed revelation that a 
false view of it, entailing the most disastrous 
consequences, should have inevitably prevailed 
and been disseminated through all the churches 
till now. 

These are troublous times. The trouble is 
everywhere : in politics, in the social system, 
in religion. But the storm-centre seems to 
be in the region of religion. The fundamental 
beliefs on which our social system has partly 
rested are giving way. To replace them 
before the edifice falls, and at the same time 
to give us such knowledge as may be attainable 
of man's estate and destiny, thought must be 
entirely free. 



IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE? 



IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE? 

The appearance of a portly and learned 
volume by the Rev. Dr. Salmond on The 
Christian Doctrine of Immortality/ shows the 
anxious interest which has been awakened in 
these questions. His treatment of the subject 
also recognizes the necessity which is felt of 
perfectly free though reverent inquiry, as our 
sole way of salvation amidst the perplexities, 
theological, social, and moral, in which we 
are now involved. For himself, he unreserv- 
edly accepts the Christian revelation. Chris- 
tianity, he is so happy as to believe, "has 
translated the hope of immortality from a 
guess, a dream, a longing, a probability, into 
a certainty, and has done this by interpreting 
us to ourselves and confirming the voice of 
prophecy within us." But he subjects the 
sacred records of Christianity to critical exam- 

99 



100 IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE? 

ination. He does not talk effete orthodoxy 
to an age of reason. Nor does he rest upon 
the evidence of Revelation alone. He en- 
deavours to combine with it that of Manifesta- 
tion as presented by reason and history. 

The change made by Darwin's great dis- 
covery — as, with all rights of modiiication 
reserved, it may surely be called,^ — in our 
notions regarding the origin of our species 
could not fail to stimulate curiosity as to its 
destiny. We held, it is true, before Darwin 
that man had been formed out of the dust; 
in that respect our ideas have undergone no 
change. It is true also that whatever our 
origin may have been, and through whatever 
process we may have gone, we are what we 
are, none the less for Darwin's discovery ; 
while the fact that we have risen from the 

1 1 once ventured to ask an eminent Darwinian whether 
he thought that within any limit of time assignable for the 
duration of bird life upon this planet, the Darwinian pro- 
cess of natural selection could have produced a bird which 
should build a nest in anticipation of laying an egg. He 
said that account must be taken of the faculty of imitation. 
To which th,e reply was, that to produce that faculty another 
Darwinian process, extending through countless aeons, 
would be required. 



IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE? 101 

dust or from the condition of the worm, in- 
stead of leading ns to despair, ought rather 
to inspire us with hope. Still, before Darwin 
we rested in the belief that man had been 
called into existence by a separate creation, in 
virtue of which he was a being apart from all 
other animals; and this belief has by Darwin 
been dispelled. A being apart from the other 
animals man remains in virtue of his reason, 
of which other animals have, at most, only the 
rudiments, and yet more perhaps in virtue of 
his aspirations and his capacity for improve- 
ment, of which even the most intelligent of 
the other animals, so far as we can see, have 
no share. He alone pursues moral good; he 
alone is religious ; he alone is speculative, 
looking before and after ; he alone feels the 
influence of beauty and expresses his sense of 
it in poetry and art ; what is lust in brutes in 
him alone is love; he alone thinks or dreams 
that there is in him anything that ought not 
to die. Yet Darwin's discovery has effaced 
the impassable line which we took to have 
been drawn by a separate creation between 
man and the be^^^t^ which perish. 



102 IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE? 

Science, moreover, Darwinian and general, 
has put an end to the traditional belief in 
the soul as a being separate from the body, 
breathed into the body by a distinct act of 
the Creator, pent up in it as in a prison-house, 
beating spiritually against the bars of the flesh 
and looking to be set free by death. Soul 
and body, we now know, form an indivisible 
whole, the nature of man being one, enfolded 
at first in the same embryo, advancing in all 
its parts and aspects through the same stages 
to maturity, and succumbing at last to the 
same decay. Not that this makes our nature 
more material in the gross sense of that term. 
Spirituality is an attribute of moral elevation 
and aspiration, not of the composition of the 
organism. Tyndall called himself a "materi- 
alist," yet no man was ever less so in the 
gross sense. If we wish to see clearly in these 
matters it might be almost better to suspend 
for a time our use of the word "soul," with 
its traditional connotation of antagonism to 
the body, and to speak only of the higher life 
or of spiritual aim and effort. 

We have, moreover, in approaching these 



IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE? 103 

questions to clear our minds entirely of geo- 
centricism, theological and philosophical as 
well as physical, of our notions of this earth 
as the centre of the universe and the grand 
scene of providential action, and at the same 
time of the ideas of our religious infancy 
about the Mosaic beginning and the Apoca- 
lyptic end of things. We have wholly to 
banish the creations of Milton's fancy, so 
strongly impressed upon our imaginations, as 
well as the Ptolemaic cosmography, and think 
no more of a heaven above and an earth be- 
low, with angels ascending and descending 
between them, or of a court of heaven look- 
ing down upon the earth. We must float out 
in thought into a universe without a centre, 
without limit, without beginning or end, of 
which all that we see on a starlight night is 
but a point, in which we ourselves are but 
living and conscious atoms. To fathom the 
mystery of the universe, — that is, the mystery 
of existence, — we cannot hope. Of eternity 
and infinity we can form no notion ; we can 
think of them only as time and space extended 
without limit, a conception which involves a 



104 IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE? 

metaphysical absurdity, since of space and 
time we must always think as divisible into 
parts, while of infinity or eternity there can 
be no division. The thought of eternal ex- 
istence, even of a life of eternal happiness, 
if we dwell upon it, turns the brain giddy ; 
it is a sort of mental torture to attempt to 
realize the idea. 

The doctrine of a future life with rewards 
for the good and punishment for the wicked, 
as we all know, pervades the New Testament. 
That this present world is evil, and Christians 
must look forward to a better, is the senti- 
ment of the Founder of Christianity and of 
all the Christian churches. It could not fail 
to be fostered by the state of the world, 
especially of a province like Galilee, under the 
Roman Empire. The Christian martyrdoms 
are a signal testimony to the same belief. 
Yet the doctrine can hardly be said to be 
so distinctly stated in the New Testament 
as its overwhelming importance might have 
led us to expect. It is in fact rather as- 
sumed than stated. The passages concern- 
ing it are rather homiletic than dogmatic ; 



IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE 105 

they are enforcements of the infinite blessed- 
ness of piety and goodness, of the infinite 
curse attending wickedness, rather than enun- 
ciations of an article for a creed. Nor is 
anything explicitly said as to the manner in 
which the mortal is to put on immortality, 
or as to the state and occupations of the 
blessed in the next world. White robes, 
harps, palm branches, a city of gold and 
jewels, are not spiritual; they must be taken 
as material imagery ; taken literally, they 
provoke the derision of the sceptic. 

Difficulties crowd upon us and severely tax 
the exegetical resources of Dr. Salmond. A 
sudden and absolute change of nature is con- 
trary to all our experience, which would lead 
us to believe that gradual progress is the 
law. The disproportion of eternal rewards 
and punishments to the merits or sins of 
man's short life is profoundly repugnant to 
our moral sense. When we take in the 
cases of children, of savages, of the hapless 
offspring of the slums, of the heathen who 
have never heard the Word, the difficulty is 
immensely increased. 



106 IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE? 

In all the clmrclies there is now a revolt 
against the belief in eternal fire, which, never- 
theless, if the Gospel is to be taken literally, 
it would seem difficult to avoid. Such a 
belief in fact can hardly be thought ever to 
have gained a practical hold on the mind ; 
if it had, it would almost have dissolved hu- 
manity with terror. Imagination could not 
have played with the idea as it does in the 
poem of Dante, where God, with his everlast- 
ing torture-house, is a thousand times more 
cruel than Eccelino or the tyrants of Milan. 

Nor is there in reality any such line of de- 
marcation between the good and the wicked 
as that drawn in the homiletic language of 
the Gospel between the wheat and the tares, 
between the sheep and the goats, between 
the people of the wide and those of the nar- 
row gate. Between the extreme points of 
goodness and wickedness there are gradations 
of character in number infinite and fluctuat- 
ing from hour to hour. The Roman Catholic 
Church tries to meet this difficulty by the 
invention of Purgatory, which, it is needless 
to say, is a creation of her own. In this case 



IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE? 107 

also the difficulty is enhanced when we take 
in children and those on whom circumstances 
have borne so hardly as almost to preclude 
volition. 

Is the doctrine of resurrection to be extended 
to every being that has borne human form, — 
the Caliban just emerging from the ape, the 
cave-dweller, the Carib, the idiot, as well as 
the infant in whom reason and morality had 
barely dawned ? Where can the line be drawn ? 

Nor are the passages in the Gospel concern- 
ing the future state, if pressed literally, alto- 
gether consistent with each other, at least 
with regard to the mode of the transition. 
The idea generally presented is that of a final 
judgment in which the good are to be sepa- 
rated from the wicked, the good entering into 
eternal joy, the wicked into eternal fire, and 
of a period of sleep or unconsciousness which 
is to last till the Judgment Day. But this 
is not consistent with the parable of Dives 
and Lazarus, with the preaching of Christ to 
the souls in prison, or with Ihe words of 
Christ on the cross to the penitent thief. 
These variations become more important when 



108 IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE? 

we consider the unspeakably vital character 
of the doctrine. 

Resurrection of the body is an article of 
the Creed. It presents insuperable difficul- 
ties ; not only are the particles of the body 
dispersed, but they must often be incorpo- 
rated into other bodies. Besides, is a babe 
to rise again a babe, and is an old man to 
rise with the body of old age ? Devices for 
meeting such difficulties may be found ; but 
they are devices and not solutions. St. 
Paul's answer to doubters involves the false 
analogy of the seed, which germinates when 
he fancies that it dies. 

It is on the Christian revelation that our 
hope has hitherto rested. Butler, when he 
applies reason to the question of a future life, 
has revelation all the time in reserve. He 
professes not to offer independent proof of 
the doctrine, but merely to disarm Reason of 
the objections which she might urge against 
Revelation. Of independent proof, with def- 
erence be it said, he offers, not so much as, 
with our present scientific lights at all events, 
will amount even to a serious intimation. 



IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE? 109 

Assuming, after the fashion of his day, that 
the soul is a being apart from the body, he 
suggests that it may be a simple monad, inde- 
cerptible and therefore indestructible, or at 
least not presumably liable to dissolution when 
the body is dissolved. But we know that 
his presumption is unfounded, and that what 
he calls the soul is but the higher and finer 
activity of our general frame. He says that 
the faculties and emotions sometimes remain 
unaffected by mortal disease even at the point 
of death. But they do not remain unaffected 
by a disease of the brain. His strongest point 
perhaps is the unbroken continuance of con- 
scious identity notwithstanding the change 
of our bodily frame by the flux of its compo- 
nent particles, and in spite of sleep and fits 
of insensibility. But the flux of particles or 
the suspension of consciousness by sleep or a 
fainting fit is a different thing from total 
dissolution, such as takes place when the body 
moulders in the grave. Besides, the phe- 
nomenon is common to us with brutes, and 
the objection that this or any other of But- 
ler's arguments would apply as well to brutes 



110 IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE? 

as to man is not to be evaded by calling 
it invidious. The great thinker would per- 
haps have seen this more clearly had he lived 
in the Darwinian age and been disenchanted 
of his belief in the special breathing of a soul 
into man. He is so far from our present 
point of view as to think that dreams are prod- 
ucts of the mind acting apart from the bodily 
sense. Do not dogs also dream? 

There are those who, like Mr. Francis 
Newman when he wrote The Soul, discard all 
arguments on this subject addressed to the 
intellect apart from the intuitions of the spirit- 
ual man. Intuition is incommunicable, and 
it is to the intellect alone that arguments can 
be addressed. Besides, if intuition or faith 
were traced to its source, it might be found 
to have sprung from an intellectual convic- 
tion implanted in early years. The existence 
of such a faculty as religious intuition inde- 
pendent of any action of the intellect would 
surely be difficult to demonstrate. 

The great thinkers of antiquity, while they 
lacked our modern science, had the advantage, 
when they had once thrown off their state 



IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE? Ill 

polytheism, of studying the problem of exis- 
tence with minds free from ecclesiastical or 
theological prepossession. Of the two greatest 
of them Plato believed intensely in a future 
life, for which this present life is but a train- 
ing, and in a future state of rewards and 
punishments. His arguments, put into the 
mouth of Socrates, who is about to die, come 
to us in the most persuasive guise. But they 
are entangled with the fanciful tenets of pre- 
existence, of knowledge as a reminiscence from 
a previous state, and of the real existence of ab- 
stract ideas. They are based on the erroneous 
conception of the soul as an entity distinct from 
the body and imprisoned in it, so that, in the 
case at least of one who has kept his soul 
pure and healthy by philosophy and asceticism, 
death would be emancipation. The soul, 
Plato thinks, cannot be affected by diseases 
of the body, but only by its own diseases, 
ignorance and vice. An evidence of more 
weight practically than any of the metaphysi- 
cal arguments adduced by the disciple of 
Socrates is the death of Socrates itself, which, 
like the Christian martyrdoms, implies a strong 



112 IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE? 

and rooted faith in the future reward of 
loyalty to truth and virtue. The same faith 
is expressed by Plato in the Republic. To 
him amid the license of Athenian democracy 
in its hour of decay, as to the Christian amid 
the demoralization of the Roman Empire, the 
world seemed evil ; and he found support for 
righteousness in the conviction that though 
the righteous man may suffer obloquy, perse- 
cution, and even a painful and shameful death 
in this life, it would be well for him in the 
final result. If there is a soul of the uni- 
verse and if it holds communion in any way 
with the soul of man, such a belief would 
seem likely to be no mere hallucination. 

In Aristotle's Ethics there is no trace of the 
doctrine, either in its specific form or in the 
form of faith in the ultimate triumph of vir- 
tue which it assumes in Plajto. The fact is 
that virtue, in our sense of the word and as 
denoting obedience to a moral law, is hardly 
a term of Aristotle's system. His virtue is 
not so much obedience to a moral law as the 
functional activity of fully developed and 
perfectly balanced humanity, such as is pre- 



IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE? 113 

sented with a rather statuesque dignity in 
his moral character of the high-minded man 
(^fieyaXoyjrvxo^^ . All that he wants is a life 
sufficiently long for full development (^to? 
reXcto?). Of compensation or retribution he 
seems to have no idea. 

In the great Stoics, Epictetus and Marcus 
Aurelius, there is no expression of belief in a 
personal life beyond the present. "What they 
seem to expect is absorption in the universe, 
which, if personality is merged, would be the 
extinction of our personal selves. On the 
other hand, they show the prof oundest faith in 
the divinity of the moral law, in the nothing- 
ness of present pleasures or pains, and in the 
infinite reward of virtue. Their asceticism 
— that of Marcus Aurelius on a throne — 
was a practical demonstration of their faith. 
In Seneca may be found a vague intimation 
of belief that death is a transition to a 
higher life ; but Seneca is a rhetorician rather 
than a philosopher. 

A belief in the immortality of the soul has 
been a part of most of the religions, yet not 
of all. It is absent from the sacred books 



114 IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE? 

of the Hebrews, strenuous as have been the 
efforts to import it into them, and bold as is 
the statement of the Anglican Articles that 
both in the Old and the New Testament 
everlasting life is offered to mankind through 
Christ. An exception such as that of the 
Hebrews, an eminently religious nation, is 
enough to bar any argument from universal 
consent, even if universal consent, where it 
can be explained by natural desire, were 
sufficient to prove a belief innate. The other 
world has often formed the lucrative domain 
of priests, who have pretended by mystic rites 
to provide the dying with a passport to ce- 
lestial bliss. Egypt seems to have been pre- 
eminent in the definiteness of her creed and 
the minuteness of her mortuary ritual, while 
she was also strangely preeminent in the effort 
to protract the existence of the bodily tene- 
ment, showing thereby apparently an absence 
of belief in the separate existence of the soul. 
The Persian faith in a future life appears also 
to have been strong, though mixed with de- 
grading absurdities which make it philosophi- 
cally worthless. Buddhism is a philosophy 



JS THERE ANOTHER LIFE? 115 

rather than a religion, while upon any hypothe- 
sis as to the meaning of Nirvana, the hope of 
the Buddhist is not personal immortality but 
escape from personal existence. Be Nirvana 
what it may, it is a fancy, generated in part 
by local influences, and offers nothing in the 
way of verification. 

" The evidences of a future life, sir, are 
sufficient," was Boswell's remark to Johnson. 
" I could wish for more, sir," was Johnson's 
reply. It was no doubt his sense of the in- 
sufficiency of the evidences, considering the 
vital character of the doctrine, that disposed 
Johnson to belief in ghosts, and made him 
anxious to investigate all stories of the kind, 
even when they were so absurd as that of the 
ghost of Cock Lane. It cannot be necessary to 
discuss such fictions. The only case, so far 
as we are aware, in which there is anything 
like first-hand evidence is that of the warning 
apparition to Lord Lyttelton, which may be 
explained as the masked suicide of a voluptuary 
sated with life. Nor can Spiritualistic appari- 
tions call for notice here. They have been 
enough exposed. Nothing is proved by them 



116 IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE? 

but the fond credulity of bereavement pining 
for communion with the lost. Spiritualism, it 
should not be forgotten, had its farcical origin 
in table-turning. Apart from the miraculous 
resurrection of Christ, and Christ's miraculous 
raisings from the dead, no one has been seen or 
heard from after death. That evidence which 
alone could be absolutely conclusive has never 
been afforded. This is the stubborn fact with 
which Butler and those who adopt his line of 
argument have to contend. 

Positivism hopes that it has indemnified, or 
more than indemnified, us for the loss of per- 
sonal immortality by tendering an imper- 
sonal immortality in the consequences of our 
lives and actions prolonged through the gen- 
erations which come after us to the end of 
time. But this immortality is not only imper- 
sonal, it is unconscious, and, therefore, so far 
as our sensations are concerned, not distin- 
guishable from annihilation. It is not even 
specially human; we share it with every 
motor, animate or inanimate ; with the horse 
which draws a wagon, with the water which 
turns a mill, with the food which passes into 



IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE? 117 

the muscles of the consumer, with the falling 
stone. 

Besides, all theories which pretend to con- 
sole man for his mortality by making him a 
partaker in the immortality of his race, seem, 
as was said before, to encounter the objection 
that the race itself is not immortal. How long 
the planet which is the abode of man will last 
or remain fit for man's habitation, the oracles 
of science may not be agreed, but they appear 
to be agreed in holding that the end must 
come. If they are right, philosophy does but 
mock us when she bids us find our real spirit- 
ual life in efforts to perfect humanity, and our 
paradise in anticipation of the state of bliss 
into which humanity, when perfected, will be 
brought. At a certain, however remote, date 
planetary wreck will be the end. Nor has the 
promise of perfection by evolution, such as 
another school of thinkers holds out, any ad- 
vantage in this respect over the promise of 
perfection by effort. Evolution, like effort, 
comes at last to naught. That death is the 
renewing of the species, and apparently indis- 
pensable to progress, might be a satisfactory 



118 IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE? 

reflection if the species were everything and 
the individual were nothing. But the indi- 
vidual is something in his own eyes. Against 
any scientific theory that human organisms are 
simply vehicles for the transmission of life 
the consciousness of each organism protests 
and rebels. It is conceivable that by the 
progress of humanity, before the end of our 
world, some glorious consummation may be 
reached. But it is hardly conceivable that 
in that consummation we or the cave-dwellers 
can have a share. 

Still less can any substitute for our hope of 
a personal immortality be found in demonstra- 
tions of the indefeasible vitality of protoplasm. 
The hope which we resign is personal. Proto- 
plastic vitality is not. Life more or less active 
may, as these comforters tell us, pervade all 
things; and in that sense we may continue to 
live after our dissolution and absorption into 
the general frame of nature. But what is the 
value of a life of which we shall not be indi- 
vidually conscious ? There may be life in the 
fermentation of a dunghill. But who can 
imagine himself blest in the prospect of shar- 
ing it ? 



IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE? 119 

Of death and of the perpetual renewal of the 
race the necessity is obvious so far as the 
present estate of man is concerned. Upon 
the succession of generations man's conjugal 
and parental character, among other things, 
depends. The existence of an undying man 
would be that of one of Swift's " Struldbrugs " 
infinitely prolonged. 

There are those who think to console them- 
selves for the shortness of life and its final ex- 
tinction at death, by saying that its very short- 
ness makes it all the more precious while it 
lasts, and that a pensive, or, to use their phrase, 
an idyllic tenderness, is imparted to it by the 
prospect of its extinction. Such an argument 
seems open to an easy reduction to absurdity, 
since it implies that the more brief and pre- 
carious the possession the more valuable is the 
thing possessed. A great deal of poetry, no 
doubt, has its source in our mortality. But 
such poetry is not an expression of enjoyment 
or gladness ; it is a melodious sigh in which 
sadness finds relief. 

It may be admitted that our non-existence 
in the future is not less conceivable than 



120 IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE? 

our non-existence in the past, which we 
take as certain, notwithstanding the Socratic 
fancy of reminiscence. But we now exist, 
and the question whether we continue to 
exist or return to nothing is one of proba- 
bility and evidence, not of possible con- 
ception. That the universe might do without 
us we may modestly admit ; whether it intends 
to do without us is what we are feebly 
endeavouring to divine. 

John Stuart Mill, in a passage of his essay 
on Immortality, highly lauded by Fitzjames 
Stephen, admits the possibility of conceiving 
that thought may continue to exist without a 
material brain, the relation of the two being no 
metaphysical necessity, but simply a constant 
coexistence within the limits of observation. 
Even if we suppose thought to embrace life, 
feeling, and affection, the mere admission that 
its disembodied existence is conceivable would 
be but cold comfort. Mill himself seems to 
fall back on the enjoyment of the present life 
exalted by the religion of humanity and end- 
ing in what he calls "eternal rest." "If," 
he says in his essay on The Utility of Religion, 



IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE? 121 

" the Religion of Humanity were as sedulously 
cultivated as the supernatural religions are, 
... all who had received the customary 
amount of moral cultivation would up to the 
hour of death live ideally in the life of those 
who are to follow them." What is the Re- 
ligion of Humanity? How can there be a 
religion without a God? How can we wor- 
ship a generalization which cannot hear prayer 
or hymn, which is not even complete, since the 
history of man is unfinished, and of which, to 
enhance. the anomaly, the worshipper himself 
is a part? Is the religion of Humanity any- 
thing more than a fervid philanthropy which 
must probably be confined to a few choice 
spirits and, so far as it involves self-sacri- 
fice, is not likely to be increased by the con- 
viction that the philanthropist, in giving up 
present good, gives up all ? What again is 
ideal life but unreal life? What is unreal 
life but death? To Mill it appears probable 
that after a length of time different in dif- 
ferent persons they would have had enough 
of existence and would gladly lie down to 
take their eternal rest. Death is not rest : 



122 IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE? 

it is destruction. When we lay ourselves 
down to rest it is with the prospect of wak- 
ing again refreshed and invigorated to new 
life. A Greek poet spoke to the heart when 
he tearfully contrasted the lot of man with 
that of the flowers of the field, which renew 
their growth at the return of spring, while 
man with all his bravery and wisdom, once 
laid in his dark and narrow bed, sleeps a sleep 
which knows no waking. 

Yet it is not the extinction of bravery and 
wisdom that most moves our pity for ourselves. 
This the next generation may repair. The 
torch of science is handed on, and the discovery 
half made by one man of science is completed, 
when he is gone, by a successor. It is the 
perpetual slaughter of affection that touches us 
most, and that, we should think, would most 
touch the Power in whose hands we are, if in 
its nature there is any affinity to mortal love. 
Affection at all events, without the survival of 
the personalities, must die for ever. 

The mere existence of a desire in man to 
prolong his being, even if it were universal, 
can afford little assurance that the desire will 



IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE? 123 

be fulfilled. Of desires that will never be 
fulfilled man's whole estate is lamentably full. 
If to each of us his own little being is inex- 
pressibly dear, so is its own little being to the 
insect, which nevertheless is crushed without 
remorse and without hope of a future existence. 
It is sad that man should perish, and 
perish just when he has reached his prime. 
This seems like cruel wastefulness in nature. 
But is not nature full of waste ? Butler rather 
philosophically finds an analogy to the waste 
of souls in the waste of seeds. He might have 
found one in the destruction of geological 
races, in the redundancy of animal life, which 
involves elimination by wholesale slaughter, in 
the multitude of children brought into the 
world only to die. The deaths of children, of 
which a large number appear inevitable, seem 
to present an insurmountable stumbling-block 
to any optimism which holds that nature can 
never be guilty of waste, even in regard to the 
highest of her works. Waste there evidently 
is in nature both animate and inanimate, and 
to an enormous extent if our intelligence tells 
us true. The earth is full of waste places as 



I 



124 IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE? 

well as of blind agencies of destruction, such 
as earthquakes, volcanic fires, and floods, while 
her satellite appears to be nothing but waste. 

Can we rest on the presumption that for all 
suffering, at least for all unmerited suffering, 
here, supreme justice must have provided com- 
pensation hereafter? Is there not an infinity 
of suffering among animals ? Are not many of 
them by the very constitution of nature doomed 
as the prey of other animals to suffer agonies 
of fear and at last a painful death ? Are not 
others fated to be tortured by parasites ? Yet 
where will be their compensation ? Where will 
be the compensation of the hapless dog which 
writhes beneath the knife of the vivisector, and 
which not only is innocent but is an involun- 
tary benefactor of humanity ? 

That a survey of nature drives us to one of 
two conclusions, either to the conclusion that 
Benevolence is not omnipotent or to the con- 
clusion that Omnipotence is not, in our accepta- 
tion of the term, purely benevolent, has been 
proved with a superfluity of logic. What may 
be behind the veil we cannot tell. But in that 
which is manifested to us there seems to be 



IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE? 125 

nothing that can warrant us in looking for 
immortality as the certain gift of unlimited 
benevolence invested with unlimited power. 
What lies beyond that which is manifested 
to us is the region not of demonstration but 
of hope. 

Yet man shrinks from annihilation. If he 
were certified of it, in spite of all that science 
or criticism has done to prepare him for disen- 
chantment, and notwithstanding the soothing 
talk of philosophers about " eternal rest," his 
being would receive a great shock. A fear- 
ful light would be thrown on the misery and 
degradation of which the world is full, has 
always been full, and is likely long to remain 
full. A fearful light would be thrown on all 
the horrors of history. The sufferers of the 
past at all events derived no comfort amidst 
famine, plague, massacre, and torture, from 
these theories of an "ideal life," of a "Reli- 
gion of Humanity," and of a "posthumous 
and subjective existence in the progress of 
the species. " A selfish tyrant like Louis XIV. 
would on this supposition, at least while his 
fortune lasted, have been of all men the 



126 IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE? 

happiest, while the victims of his selfish ambi- 
tion or rapine, slaughtered in his profligate 
wars, perishing of hunger through his extrava- 
gance, or worked to death as slaves in his 
galleys, would have been of all men the most 
miserable. 

Is there any voice in our nature which dis- 
tinctly tells us that death is not the end ? If 
there is, there seems to be no reason why we 
should not listen to it, even though its message 
may be incapable of verification such as in 
regard to a material hypothesis is required by 
physical science. That the intelligence of our 
five senses, of which science is the systematized 
record, is exhaustive, we have, as was before 
said, no apparent ground for assuming; the 
probability seems to be the other way ; it 
seems likely that our senses, mere nerves even 
if completely evolved, are imperfect monitors, 
and that we may be living in a universe of 
which we really know as little as the mole, 
which no doubt seems to itself to perceive 
everything that is perceptible, knows of the 
world of sight. Now, there does seem to be 
a voice in every man which, if he will listen to 



IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE? 127 

it, tells him that his account is not closed at 
death. The good man, however unfortunate 
he may have been, and even though he may 
not have found integrity profitable, feels at the 
end of life a satisfaction in his past and an 
assurance that in the sum of things he will find 
that he has chosen aright. The most obdu- 
rately wicked man, however his wickedness may 
have prospered, will probably wish when he 
comes to die that he had lived the life of the 
righteous. It may be possible to explain the 
sanctions or warnings of conscience generally 
as the influence of human opinion reflected in 
the individual mind, transmitted perhaps by 
inheritance and accumulated in transmission. 
But such an explanation will hardly cover the 
case of death-bed self -approbation or remorse. 
There seems to be no reason why we should 
not trust the normal indications of our moral 
nature as well as the normal indications of our 
bodily sense ; and against the belief that the 
greatest benefactors and the greatest enemies 
of mankind rot at last undistinguished in the 
same grave our moral nature vehemently 
rebels. 



128 IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE? 

This at all events is certain : if death is 
to end all alike for the righteous and for the 
unrighteous, for those who have been blessings 
and for those who have been curses to their 
kind, the Power which rules the universe can- 
not be just in any sense of the word which 
we can understand. 

Is there anything which appears to transcend 
the conditions of man's present existence, to 
be likely to survive and be carried over to a 
larger sphere of being ? This seems to be the 
practical question if the subject is to be re- 
garded from the strictly rational point of view. 
Character is no doubt formed by action on a 
basis of natural tendency, under the moulding 
.environment of circumstance ; nor can it be 
.affirmed that there is anything in moral action 
not dictated by the present requirements of 
our state as domestic and social beings, having 
relations with others, as well as being under 
the necessity of caring for ourselves. Yet, 
while formed and manifested by acting in 
conformity with the rules of our present life, 
character seems when formed to have a value 
and a beauty of its own, apart from its use- 



IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE? 129 

fulness in current action ; so that we can 
contemplate it, mark its improvement or dete- 
rioration in ourselves, and make its improve- 
ment the object of distinct and conscious 
effort. What we call spiritual life seems in^^' 
fact to be the cultivation of character carried " 
on under religious influence by a sort of inner 
self. It is conceivable that good and beauti-^"" 
ful character may be prized by the Soul of 
the Universe, if the universe has a soul, as 
capable of union with itself, and that it may 
thus transcend the limits of our being here. 
If this is but a hint, on a question at once so 
dark and of such overwhelming importance, 
we may gladly welcome the faintest gleam 
of light. 

At the same time, so far as we can discern, 
character can be formed only by effort, which 
implies something against which to strive; 
so that without evil, or what appears to us 
evil, character could not be formed. The ex- 
istence of evil in fact, so far as we can see, is 
the necessary condition of active life. For 
aught we know, effort, or something which we 
can only describe as effort, not fiat or mere 



130 IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE? 

evolution, may be the real law of the universe. 
It is true that the immortality to which 
any suggestion of this kind points would be 
of the conditional kind, since good character 
only could have a life-giving affinity to the 
power of good. 

To all the questionings about the origin of 
evil, which the writer of Genesis answered 
by the story of the Forbidden Fruit, our 
answer must be that what we call evil is a 
part of the constitution of the universe. 

Supposing all proofs of personal immor- 
tality failed us, we should have to fall back 
upon the Stoic idea of reabsorption in the 
universe and union with its workings and 
destinies, whatever they may be. If con- 
sciousness and affection are lost, pain, suf- 
fering, and unfulfilled desire at all events 
will be no more. 

All arguments of this kind of course have 
relation to the natural aspect of things apart 
from revelation. He who, with Dr. Sal- 
mond, believes that he has a divine revela- 
tion in the Gospel, and a pledge of immor- 
tality in union with Christ, can stand in no 



IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE? 131 

need of further assurance otherwise than in 
the way of corroboration. He discusses the 
natural evidences, like Butler, with revelation 
in reserve. 

There are those who think they display 
their good sense in bidding us give up these 
speculations, which, they tell us, are beyond 
the range of our understandings, and culti- 
vate our pleasure and happiness in the present 
world. One element of our pleasure and 
happiness is the gratification of curiosity on 
the highest subjects. Our curiosity has been 
or is being gratified as to the origin of our 
species, and surely the destiny of our species 
is a question not less interesting even to sci- 
ence, while it is inevitably set on foot by the 
other. However, pleasure and happiness are 
different things. Pleasure may be felt by the 
condemned convict in eating his last meal. 
But happiness seems to imply the sense of 
security and permanence. It can hardly be 
predicated of a being whose life is never safe 
and at most endures but for an hour. 

The estate of man upon this earth of 
ours may in course of time be vastly improved. 



132 IS THE BE ANOTHER LIFE? 

So much seems to be promised by the recent 
achievements of science, whose advance is in 
geometrical progression, each discovery giv- 
ing birth to several more. Increase of health 
and extension of life by sanitary, dietetic, and 
gymnastic improvement ; increase of wealth 
by invention, and of leisure by the substitu- 
tion of machinery for labour ; more equal dis- 
tribution of wealth, with its comforts and 
refinements; diffusion of knowledge; political 
improvement; elevation of the domestic affec- 
tions and social sentiments ; unification of 
mankind, and elimination of war through 
ascendency of reason over passion, — all these 
things may be carried to an indefinite extent, 
and may produce what in comparison with the 
present estate of man would be a terrestrial 
paradise. Selection and the merciless struggle 
for existence may be in some measure super- 
seded by selection of a more scientific and 
merciful kind. Death may be deprived at 
all events of its pangs. On the other hand, 
the horizon does not appear to be clear 
of cloud. The pressure of population is 
a danger which the anti-Malthusian can no 



IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE? 133 

longer set at naught, and to check which it 
is certain that Providence will not interpose. 
The tendency of the factory with its increas- 
ing division of labour has not hitherto been 
to make industrial life less monotonous or 
more cheerful. Frost, heat, storm, drought, 
and earthquake, human progress can hardly 
abate. Art and poetry do not seem likely to 
advance with the ascendency of severe science. 
There is some truth in the saying of the poet 
that a glory has passed away from the earth. 
However, let our fancy suppose the most 
chimerical of Utopias realized in a com- 
monwealth of man. Mortal life prolonged to 
any conceivable extent is but a span. Still 
over every festal board in the community of 
terrestrial bliss will be cast the shadow of 
approaching death; and the sweeter life be- 
comes, the more bitter death will be. The 
more bitter it will be at least to the ordinary 
man, and the number of philosophers like 
John Stuart Mill is small. 



THE MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN 
CHRISTIANITY 



THE MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN 
CHKISTIANITY 

The effect produced by the teaching of 
Jesus and his disciples is, beyond question, 
the most momentous fact in history. If cir- 
cumstances, such as the fusion of races under 
the Roman Empire and the distress attend- 
ant on the decline of the Empire concurred, 
Christianity was the motive power. The con- 
version of Saul marks the greatness of the 
moral change. It is the proclamation of a 
new ideal of human brotherhood and purity 
of life. Here, if at any point in history, we 
may believe that the Spirit of the World, if 
the world has a spirit, was at work. If evil \ 
to a terrible extent as well as good has appar- | 
ently flowed from the Gospel; if Christianity f 
has given birth to priestcraft, intolerance, \ 
persecution, and religious war, as well as to ^ 
137 



138 MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 

some perversions of morality, it is because 
the miraculous elements, and the circle of 
ecclesiastical dogma which under the theo- 
sophic influences of the succeeding age formed 
itself around them, have been allowed to 
overlay and obscure the character and teach- 
I ing of Jesus of Nazareth. 

The author of Supernatural Religion^ after 
demolishing, as he conceives, the authority of 
the ecclesiastical canon, himself says of the 
ethical system of Christianity: — 

"It must be admitted that Christian ethics 
were not in their details either new or origi- 
nal. The precepts which distinguish the 
system may be found separately in early 
religions, in ancient philosophies, and in the 
utterances of the great poets and seers of 
Israel. The teaching of Jesus, however, car- 
ried morality to the sublimest point attained 
or even attainable by humanity. The influence 
of his spiritual religion has been rendered 
doubly great by the unparalleled purity and 
elevation of his own character. Surpassing 
in his sublime simplicity and earnestness the 
moral grandeur of ^tiakya-mouni, and putting 



MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 139 

to the blush the sometimes sullied, though 
generally admirable, teaching of Socrates and 
Plato, and the whole round of Greek philoso- 
phers, he presented the rare spectacle of a 
life, so far as we can estimate it, uniformly 
noble and consistent with his own lofty prin- 
ciples, so that the * imitation of Christ' has 
become almost the final word in the preach- 
ing of his religion, and must continue to be 
one of the most powerful elements of its 
permanence. His system might not be new, 
but it was in a high sense the perfect devel- 
opment of natural morality, and it was final 
in this respect amongst others, that, super- 
seding codes of law and elaborate rules of 
life, it confined itself to two fundamental 
principles: love to God and love to man. 
Whilst all previous systems had merely sought 
to purify the stream, it demanded the purifi- 
cation of the fountain. It placed the evil 
thought on a par with the evil action. Such 
morality, based upon the intelligent and ear- 
nest acceptance of divine law, and perfect 
recognition of the brotherhood of man, is the 
highest conceivable by humanity, and although 



140 MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 

its power and influence must augment with 
the increase of enlightenment, it is itself be- 
yond development, consisting as it does of 
principles unlimited in their range and in- 
exhaustible in their application. Its perfect 
realization is that true spiritual Nirv^wa which 
9hakya-mouni has clearly conceived, and ob- 
scured with Oriental mysticism: extinction 
of rebellious personal opposition to divine 
order, and the attainment of perfect harmony 
with the will of God."i 

Of the four religions which have been styled 
universal, Christianity alone is universal in 
fact. Christianity alone preaches its Gospel 
to the whole world. A Buddhist element has 
recently found its way into a certain school 
of European philosophy, but not through Bud- 
dhist preaching or under a Buddhist form. 
Mahometanism and Buddhism are something 
more than local or tribal, yet less than uni- 
versal. Mahometanism is military, as its 
Koran avows. In conquest it lives, with con- 
quest it decays; it also practically belongs 
to the despotic, polygamic, and slave-owning 
1 Vol. II., pp. 487-8. 



MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 141 

East. It has never been the religion of a 
Western race, or of a free and industrial com- 
munity. By arms it has been propagated, or 
by local inJfluence and contagion, not by mis- 
sions. Buddhism, if it is really a religion 
and not rather a quietist philosophy engen- 
dered of languor and suffering, is partly 
a religion of climate and of race; of its 
boasted myriads the majority, the Chinese, 
retain little more than a tincture of Buddha, 
while all are enclosed within a ring-fence in 
a particular quarter of the globe. Its Euro- 
pean offspring is a philosophy of despair. 
Judaism, after its rejection of Christianity, 
itself fell back into a tribalism, which is of 
all tribalisms morally the most anti-social, 
since it is not primitive and natural but self- 
enforced and artificially maintained in the face 
of humanity; while the proselytism which was 
rife when the philosophic Judaism of Philo was 
verging on universality has since that epoch 
ceased. It is to be noted also that Christianity* 
is almost alone in its display of recuperative 
power. No parallel to the revivals of Wycliff, 
Luther, Calvin, and Wesley is presented by any 



142 MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 

other religion. The Wahabi movement will 
hardly be thought as a spiritual revival to 
deserve that rank. 
y^ Moral civilization and sustained progress 
have been thus far limited to Christendom. 
So have distinct and effective ideas of human 
brotherhood, which implies a common frater- 
nity, and of the service of humanity. In Bud- 
dhism, if they have been distinct, they cannot 
be said to have been equally effective. They 
seem to be closely connected with the Christian 
idea of the Church, with its struggle for the 
emancipation of the world from the powers 
of evil and with its hope of final victory. 

Much, therefore, of what we have cherished 
would still stand even if our evidence for the 
miracles should fall.^ 

We need hardly expend thought on the 
discussion as to the possibility of believing 
^ in miracles. The very term supposes the 
existence of a power above nature, able to 
reveal itself by a suspension of nature's ordi- 
nary course and willing so to reveal itself for 
the salvation of mankind. There is nothing 
apparently repugnant to reason in such a sup- 



MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 143 

position. The existence of the power is even 
implied in the phrase " laws of nature " con- 
stantly used by science; for wherever there 
is a law there must be a law-giver, and the 
law-giver must be presumed capable of sus- 
pending the operation of law. This Hume 
himself would hardly have denied. In fact, 
the metaphysical argument against mira- 
cles comes, as has been said before, pretty 
much to this, that a miracle cannot take 
place, because if it did it would be a miracle. 
We could not help believing our own senses 
if we actually saw a man raised from the 
dead. There is no reason why we should not 
believe the testimony of other people, pro- 
vided that they were eye-witnesses, that they 
were competent in character and in intelli- 
gence, and that their testimony had been 
submitted to impartial and thorough investi- 
gation. Suppose a hundred men of known 
character, judgment, and scientific attain- 
ments were to unite in declaring that they 
had seen a blind man restored to sight or a 
man raised from the dead in circumstances 
precluding the possibility of fraud or illusion, 



144 MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 

should we, as Hume says, at once reject their 
testimony ? On what ground ? On the ground 
of universal experience? Experience, being 
only previous uniformity, is broken by a well- 
attested exception. We assume an adequate 
object, such as the revelation to man of vital 
truth undiscoverable by his own intellect 
would be. It is simply a question of evi- 
dence. All will allow that we require either 
the evidence of our own senses or an extraor- 
dinary amount of unexceptionable testimony 
to warrant us in accepting a miracle. 

That the Supreme Being, supposing that 
he intended to reveal himself by miracle for 
the salvation of mankind, and required belief 
in the miracle as the condition of our salva- 
tion, would provide us with conclusive evi- 
dence, may surely be assumed. A miracle is 
an appeal to our reason through our senses, 
and to make it valid either the evidence of 
our own senses, or evidence equivalent to 
that of our own senses, is required. To call 
upon us to believe without sufficient evidence 
would be to put an end to belief itself in 
any rational sense of the term. Theologians 



MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 145 

always take advantage of proof so far as it 
is forthcoming. Faith, to which they have 
appealed in defect of proof, is a belief, not 
in things unproved, but in things unseen. 
Miracles may be accepted on the evidence of 
a church assumed to be itself divine; they 
may even be accepted on the supposed evi- 
dence of a spiritual sense illuminated by 
divine influence; but if we are to accept 
them on the evidence of reason, there must 
be satisfactory eye-witnesses. What ocular 
testimony do we possess? 

In the fifteenth chapter of the first Epistle 
to the Corinthians St. Paul says that the 
risen. Christ had appeared to him. He says 
simply appeared (w^^?;). He gives no par- 
ticulars nor anything which can enable us to 
judge whether the apparition was certainly 
real, or whether it may have been the product 
of ecstatic imagination, like the apparition 
seen by Colonel Gardiner or those which made 
Coleridge say that he did not believe in 
ghosts because he had seen too many of them. 
Three detailed accounts of the vision are 
given in the Acts, but not one of them can 



146 MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 

be traced to St. Paul, though two of them 
are put into his mouth; and they are at vari- 
ance with each other, one (Acts ix. 7) say- 
ing that St. Paul's fellow-travellers heard 
the voice but saw no man; another (Acts 
xxii. 9) saying that they saw the light but 
did not hear the voice; while the utterances 
of the voice itself differ widely in the three 
passages (compare Acts ix. 4-7, with Acts 
xxii. 7, 8, and more especially with Acts 
xxvi. 14-19), though it would seem that the 
words ought to have made an indelible im- 
pression; not to mention that "it is hard for 
thee to kick against the goad" is a strange 
phrase to be used by a voice from heaven. 

In the same passage of the first Epistle to 
the Corinthians St. Paul states "that Christ 
died for our sins according to the Scriptures ; 
that he was buried; that he had been raised 
on the third day according to the Scriptures; 
that he had appeared unto Cephas, then to the 
twelve; that he had afterwards appeared to 
about five hundred brethren at once, of whom 
the greater part remained till that time, but 
some were fallen asleep; then to James; then 



MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 147 

to all the apostles." It is natural to assume 
that St. Paul learned this from Peter and 
James, the two apostles whom he saw on his 
first visit to Jerusalem after his conversion. 
But he does not cite their authority, much 
less does he say that he had taken any meas- 
ures to sift their evidence. Nor is it likely 
that he would have taken such measures, 
being, as he was, an ardent proselyte of 
three years' standing, and having staked his 
spiritual life on the resurrection of Christ. 
Here again he uses the expression " appeared " 
(w(/>^77), and leaves us once more to speculate 
on the effect of enthusiasm in giving birth to 
visions and on the contagion of excited im- 
agination. He says nothing about the inter- 
course of the risen Christ with his Apostles 
during the days preceding the Ascension. Nor 
does it seem easy to harmonize his story with 
that of the Gospels. 

Some attestations of miracles given in the 
Acts are in the first person, implying that 
an eye-witness is speaking. The eye-wit- 
ness, however, is anonymous, and we have 
no means of testing his trustworthiness. The 



148 MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 

escape of St. Paul at Melita from the sting 
of the viper which had come out of the 
burning sticks and fastened on his hand, 
and his prophetic reliance upon God in the 
shipwreck, while they are vividly attested, 
can hardly be called miraculous. 

In 1 Corinthians xii. 4-11, St. Paul refers 
in a general way to the existence of miracu- 
lous gifts among members of the Church : 
"Now there are diversities of gifts, but 
the same Spirit. And there are diversities 
of ministrations, and the same Lord. And 
there are diversities of workings, but the 
same God, who worketh all things in all. 
But to each one is given the manifestation 
of the Spirit to profit withal. For to one is 
given through the Spirit the word of wis- 
dom; and to another the word of knowledge, 
according to the same Spirit: to another 
faith, in the same Spirit; and to another 
gifts of healings, in the one Spirit; and to 
another workings of miracles; and to another 
prophecy; and to another discernings of 
spirits: to another divers kinds of tongues; 
and to another the interpretation of tongues: 



MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 149 

but all these worketh the one and the same 
Spirit, dividing to each one severally even as 
he will." Gifts of divers kinds of tongues 
and of the interpretation of tongues, it will 
be observed, are put on a level with the rest, 
though St. Paul himself (1 Corinthians xiv.) 
treats those gifts as equivocal, and we know 
from modern experience that they may be the 
offspring of self-delusion; while the account 
of the gift of tongues in Acts ii. 8, as that 
of speaking divers known languages, is at 
variance with the words of St. Paul, who 
describes it as that of speaking in a tongue 
unknown to all. St. Paul does not testify to 
the occurrence of any specific miracle other 
than his own vision, nor does he profess to 
have performed a specific miracle himself. 
His general appeal is not to miracles but to 
the divine character and merits of Christ. 

In the first Epistle of St. Peter there are 
allusions (i. 3 and iii. 18) to the resurrec- 
tion of Christ. But they are connected with 
an allusion to his preaching "unto the spirits 
in prison, which aforetime were disobedient, 
when the longsuffering of God waited in 



150 MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 

the days of Noah while the ark was a pre- 
paring"; a tradition which implies belief in 
the Noachic legend, while its character seems 
to militate against the authenticity of the 
Epistle as the work of a companion of 
Christ, since actual contact with reality 
usually sets bounds to imagination. In the 
second Epistle of St. Peter there is an allu- 
sion to the Transfiguration. But the authen- 
ticity of the second Epistle of St. Peter is 
strongly impugned and feebly defended. 

The testimony comprised in the above pas- 
sages is, apparently, the sum-total of the 
ocular evidence producible for the miracu- 
lous part of Christianity. Besides this there 
is nothing but tradition of unknown origin 
recorded by unknown writers at a date 
uncertain and, for aught that we can tell, 
many years after the events. The four 
Gospels are anonymous. Two of them, the 
second and third, are not even ascribed to 
eye-witnesses, while the preface to the third 
distinctly implies that it is not the work of 
an eye-witness, but of one of a number of 
compilers. The first Gospel, if Matthew were 



MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 151 

really its author, would be the work of an 
eye-witness. But it seems to be certainly 
attested that if Matthew wrote a Gospel at 
all it was in Hebrew, whereas the first Gos- 
pel is in Greek and is pronounced to be not 
even a translation from the Hebrew. In the 
fourth Gospel there is an attestation; but it 
is anonymous and suspicious, serving rather 
to shake than to confirm our belief in apos- 
tolic authorship; for why should not the 
writer himself have given his name instead 
of leaving the authenticity to be attested by 
an unknown hand ? Of the proof tendered for 
the authenticity of this Gospel as the work 
of St. John, it may safely be said that it is 
not such as would be accepted in the case of 
any ordinary work. Of the most recent 
experts there is a decided and apparently 
growing majority on the other side. The 
Apocalypse as well as the Gospel was 
ascribed by the Church to St. John, and as 
the difference of character and style is such 
that the two cannot have been by the same 
hand, whatever makes for the authenticity 
of the Apocalypse makes against the authen-' 



152 MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 

ticity of the Gospel. Nothing can seem more 
unlikely than that a Gospel tinctured with 
Alexandrian theosophy should be the work of 
a simple fisherman of Galilee. Nor is there 
any similarity between the character of John 
depicted in the first three Gospels and that 
with which the fourth Gospel is suffused. The 
writer's attitude of aversion towards the Jews 
and his references to their laws and customs as 
those of another nation are scarcely compatible 
with the supposition that he was himself a Jew. 
Not one of the four Gospels can be shown 
with any certainty to have existed in its 
present form till a period had elapsed after 
the events fully sufficient, in a totally un- 
critical age, for the growth of any amount of 
miraculous legend, as the biographies of 
numerous saints in the Middle Ages prove. 
This much at the very least seems to have 
been established by the author of Super- 
natural Religion^ whose main argument, as 
Matthew Arnold says, is not to be shaken 
by pursuing him into minor issues and dis- 
crediting him there. It is alleged that the 
Gospels must have been written before the 



MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 153 

destruction of Jerusalem, because they do not 
refer to that catastrophe but seem to speak 
of the "altar" as if it were still existing. 
The answer appears to be that if the tradi- 
tions worked up by the Evangelists were 
anterior to the fall of Jerusalem, there is no 
reason why that event should be imported 
into them. Legends do not ordinarily men- 
tion intervening events. Besides, there does 
appear in Matthew xxiv. and Mark xiii. to 
be an allusion to the flight of the Christians 
in the day of conflict. 

In the narratives of the first three Evan- 
gelists, there is found a large common ele- 
ment. It appears that if the whole text of 
the Synoptics is broken up into one hun- 
dred and seventy-four sections, fifty-eight of 
these are common to all three; twenty-six 
besides to Matthew and Mark; seventeen to 
Mark and Luke; thirty-two to Matthew and 
Luke; leaving only forty-one unshared ele- 
ments, of which thirty-one are found in 
Luke, seven in Matthew, and three in Mark.^ 

1 Martineau, Seat of Authority in Meligion, p. 184. See 
also the following pages. 



154 MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 

This similarity in the selection of a limited 
portion of the Life, combined with the actual 
identity of language in so many passages, has 
been justly thought to preclude the hypothesis 
of independent authorship and to suggest com- 
pilation on a common basis. There must on 
that supposition have been an interval of time 
between the events and the compilation during 
which the common basis was formed. 
f It is surely incredible that divine Provi- 
I dence, intending to consign facts on the 
I knowledge of which the salvation of man 
depended to particular writings, should not 
have placed the authorship and date of those 
writings beyond a doubt. 

Not one of the four Evangelists claims 
inspiration. The author of the third Gospel 
seems distinctly to renounce it, putting his 
narrative on a level with a number of others, 
over which he asserts his superiority, if at 
all, only in carefulness of investigation. The 
Church, however, has treated all four Gospels 
as equally inspired. Papias on the other hand, 
in the middle of the second century, seems to 
recognize no Gospel as inspired, holding that 



MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 155 

nothing derived from books was so profitable 
as the living voice of tradition. 

There would be a natural and almost over- 
whelming temptation to ascribe an anony- 
mous and popular history of Christ to one of 
the apostles; and this would be done in an 
uncritical age without any thought of fraud. 
It is true that we accept without question 
the works of Tacitus and other ancient his- 
torians, though anonymous, as those of their 
reputed authors. But in these cases there 
was no temptation to false ascription, nor 
does it greatly signify who wrote the his- 
tory, the facts neither requiring an extraor- 
dinary amount of evidence, nor being vital to 
the salvation of mankind. 

Of some of the miraculous parts of the 
Gospel, such, for instance, as the Temptation 
in the Wilderness, and the Agony in the 
Garden, with the descent of the angel, there 
could be no eye-witnesses. Of the Annuncia- 
tion and the Immaculate Conception the only 
possible witness tells us nothing. It is hard 
indeed to see how we could have eye-wit- 
nesses to anything which happened before 



156 MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 

/the calling of the apostles. Who can have 
I reported to the Evangelist the canticles of 
I Mary, Zacharias, and Simeon? Here surely 
I we are dealing with legend and poetry, not 
I with historic fact. 

Between the narratives of the different 
Gospels there are discrepancies which baffle 
the harmonists. Between the narratives of 
the Resurrection and the events which follow 
there are discrepancies which drive the har- 
monists to despair. There are contradictions 
as to the names of the apostles, the behav- 
iour of the two thieves at the Crucifixion, 
the attendance at the cross. There is a con- 
tradiction with regard to the miracle at 
Gadara, one Gospel giving a single demo- 
niac, the other a pair. Three Gospels treat 
Galilee, the fourth Judea, as the chief centre 
of the ministry. One Gospel gives, another 
omits, such incidents as the Annunciation, 
the Adoration of the Magi, the Temptation, 
the Transfiguration, the raising of Lazarus, 
and the conversation with the woman of 
Samaria; while the suggestion that the nar- 
ratives were intended to supplement each 



MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 157 

other is gratuitous in itself, and is repelled 
by the existence of a large common element 
in the first three. But the most notable 
discrepancy of all perhaps is that respecting 
the day of the Crucifixion, and the character . 
of the Last Supper. The first three Gospels • 
make Christ eat the Passover with his dis- 
ciples and suffer on the day following; the 
fourth puts the Crucifixion on the day of 
the Preparation for the Passover, suggesting 
that Christ was the Paschal Lamb sacrificed 
for the sins of the world. In the first three 
Gospels the Last Supper plainly is the Pass- 
over; in the fourth it as plainly is not. To 
force the two accounts into agreement des- 
perate expedients, such as the supposition 
of a religious meal, not identical with the 
Passover but identical with the Last Supper, 
have been tried. But God would scarcely 
have left inspired narratives of an event on 
which human salvation was to depend to be 
reconciled by extreme expedients invented 
eighteen centuries afterwards by learned and * 
ingenious minds. Unless the two accounts 
can be reconciled, it is obvious that the 



168 MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 

author of one of them can have been no eye- 
witness nor even well-informed. 

It is idle to contend that such discrepan- 
cies are of a minor kind and the ordinary 
variations of human testimony, even on the 
strange supposition that the Holy Spirit 
would either lapse into the infirmities of 
human testimony or simulate them in dic- 
tating the Gospel narrative. They are such 
as would certainly invalidate human testi- 
mony to any extraordinary event. 

Between the general representation of 
Christ's character and teaching in the first 
three Gospels and that in the fourth, there 
is marked divergence. The teaching in the 
first three is generally ethical, in the fourth 
it is theological. The character of Christ in 
the first is that of a divine teacher; in the 
fourth it is that of the second Person in the 
Trinity and the Logos. The fourth Gos- 
pel has, indeed, in modern times been pre- 
ferred to the other three on account of its 
specially theological character and its spir- 
itual elevation. When we find a similar 
divergence between the Xenophontic and the 



MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 159 

Platonic Socrates, we conclude that the Pla- 
tonic Socrates is largely the creation of Plato. 
Testimony is plainly invalidated by the ascen- 
dency of imagination. 

Sufficient attention seems hardly to have 
been paid to the adverse weight of negative 
evidence. A teacher who has been drawing 
all eyes upon him by his words and by a course 
of stupendous miracles, culminating in the 
raising from the dead of a man who had been [• 
four days in the grave, enters Jerusalem amidst ' 
the acclamations of a vast concourse of people. ; 
He is brought before the Sanhedrim and after- f 
wards tried in the most public manner before 
the Roman governor. The governor's wife isj 
warned about him in a dream. He is crucified, \ 
and when he expires miraculous darkness covers '; 
the earth for three hours, the earth quakes, the ■ 
veil of the temple is rent in twain from the 
top to the bottom, the tombs are opened, and I 
bodies of the saints that slept come forth \ 
out of the grave, enter into the holy city, 
and appear to many. The Roman centurion 
and the watch are impressed, and say thati 
this truly was the Son of God. But other- \ 



160 MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 

wise no impression is made, no notice of 

these tremendous events seems to be taken, 

no trace of them is left in general history,^ 

no one apparently is converted, not even 

\ Saul. The Jews, of whose acts this was an 

\ overwhelming condemnation, are so little 

! impressed that they think only of bribing the 

I watch to confess that the body of Jesus had 

I been stolen from the tomb. 

We cannot pick and choose. The evidence 
upon which the miraculous darkness and the 
apparitions of the dead rest is the same as 
that upon which all the other miracles rest, 
and must be accepted or rejected in all the 
cases alike. 

The Acts, like the Gospels, is anonymous, 
and if its author is identical with the author 
of the third Gospel, this shows that he 
was not an eye-witness of the Resurrection. 
An examination of its internal difficulties 

1 Gibbon, who has not failed to make the point, though 
he has hardly pushed the argument home, observes that the 
preternatural darkness happened in the time of Pliny, the 
naturalist, and of Seneca, who wrote a collection of natural 
facts in seven books, and is not mentioned by either of them. 
Pliny, however, would be a boy at that date. 



MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY I6l 

would be beside our present purpose, which is 
to ascertain the amount and value of the ocular 
testimony to the miracles. It seems to be ad- 
mitted that there is no positive and unequiv- 
ocal evidence of the existence of this book . 
till towards the end of the second century. \ 
Is it conceivable that Providence would j 
allow vital truth, or anything essential to j 
our belief in vital truth, to be stamped with| 
the mark of falsehood? The demoniac mira-| 
cles are clearly stamped with the mark of 
Jewish superstition. To the imagination of 
the Jews at this period, spirits good and evil 
were everywhere present. They were witB, 
you in the lecture-room; they were with 
you in every function of life. From the 
fourth Gospel demoniac miracles are absent,! 
not because that Gospel is supplementary, a'\ 
supposition for which, as was before said, \ 
there is no sort of colour, but because the ! 
first three Gospels were written for Jewish 
readers to whom demoniac miracles were con- 
genial, while the fourth Gospel was written 
for an intellectual circle to which they were 
not congenial, and perhaps at a later day. 



f 



162 MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 

According to Mark, Jesus casts a legion 
of devils out of a man into a herd of two 
thousand swine, which forthwith rush down 
into the sea and are drowned. The comment 
of an orthodox writer of great eminence upon 
this astounding and repellent miracle is 
this: "That the demoniac was healed — 
that in the terrible final paroxysm which 
usually accompanied the deliverance from 
this strange and awful malady, a herd of 
swine was in some way affected with such 
wild terror as to rush headlong in large 
numbers over a steep hillside into the waters 
of the lake — and that, in the minds of all 
who were present, including that of the suf- 
ferer himself, this precipitate rushing of the 
swine was connected with the man's release 
from his demoniac thraldom ■ — thus much is 
clear. "1 Such attempts to minimize the 
miracles or reduce them within the compass 
of possible belief are common in writings 
of liberal theologians, especially of Germans. 
In the miracle of the conversion of water 
into wine at Cana, Olshausen would have us 
1 The Life of Christ, by Frederic W. Farrar, I., 337. 



MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 163 

suppose that we have only an accelerated 
operation of nature; Neander, that the water 
was magnetized; Lange, that the guests were 
in a state of supernatural exaltation. With 
regard to the acceleration hypothesis, a criti- 
cal physicist has remarked that nature alone, 
whatever time you give her, will never make 
thirty imperial gallons of wine without at 
least ten pounds of carbon. 

What is hard to believe in the miracle of 
Bethesda, the liberal theologian escapes by 
remarking that there is no indication in the 
narrative that any one who used the water 
was at once or miraculously healed ; that the 
repeated use of an intermittent and gaseous 
spring, a character which more than one of 
the springs about Jerusalem continue to bear 
to the present day, was, doubtless, likely to 
produce most beneficial results. He further 
suggests that it was as much the man's will 
that was paralyzed as his limbs. Of the troub- 
ling of the water by the angel, apologists are 
glad to be rid by dismissing it as a popular 
legend, interpolated into the text of St. John. 
But so long as anything miraculous is left the 



164 MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 

difficulty of proof remains; while if nothing 
miraculous is left there is an end of this dis- 
cussion. Nor, it must be repeated, can we 
pick and choose among the miracles, as some 
are evidently inclined to do. The evidence 
for the miracle of the demoniac and the swine 
is just the same as that for any other miracle. 
All rest upon the same testimony and must 
stand or fall together. 

Jewish belief both in angels and devils is 
entwined with the history of the first three 
Gospels; the archangel Gabriel, with a He- 
brew name, announces the birth of Christ; 
angels proclaim it to the shepherds; angels 
appear again at the tomb of Christ; Satan 
comes in person to tempt Christ in the wil- 
derness. There are angels in the fourth 
Gospel, but there is no personal Satan. 

From the preface to the third Gospel it 
appears that many had drawn up narratives 
concerning the life of Christ. Upon what 
principle the four were selected by the 
Church as inspired and authoritative we can- 
not tell. Irenseus said that as there were 
four quarters of the world and four chief 



MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 165 

winds, the Gospels, which were to be coex- 
tensive with the world and to be the breath 
of life to its inhabitants, must be four. Be- 
sides, the Gospel was given by him who sits 
above the fourfold cherubim, four was the 
number of the Beasts, and four were God's 
covenants through Adam, Noah, Moses, and 
Christ. It is probable that these four narra- 
tives survived by their intrinsic merits. But 
for their authenticity little security can be 
found in the critical faculty or discernment 
of the patristic age. 

Miraculous Christianity involves anti-sci- / 
entific ideas of the world. It assumes that 
the earth is the centre of the universe with 
the heaven, which is the abode of the Deity, 
stretched above it, and Hades sunk beneath 
it. The angels and the mystic dove descend 
from the skies, and the risen Christ ascends 
to them. When Satan shows Christ all the | 
kingdoms of the earth from a high mountain, \ 
the writer seems to take the globe for a 
plane. The theological geocentricism, which 
makes our planet the centre of all interest, 
the especial care of the Divinity, and the sole 



166 MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 

field of divine action, appears in the Johan- 
nine doctrine of the Trinity. It might be 
possible to imagine Deity stooping from a 
limited heaven to redeem the inhabitants of 
earth. It would have been hardly possible 
to imagine a Being who fills eternity and 
infinity becoming, for the redemption of one 
speck in the universe, an embryo in the 
womb of a Jewish maiden. For this stupen- 
dous doctrine our principal evidence is the 
anonymous work of a mystic writer. 

The Incarnation, it will be observed, is 
the centre of this whole circle of miracles. 
Without it they can be hardly said to have 
a purpose or a meaning. But since our rejec- 
tion of the authenticity and authority of the 
book of Genesis, the purpose and meaning of 
the Incarnation itself have been withdrawn. 
If there was no Fall of Man, there can be no 
need of the Redemption. If there was no 
need of the Redemption, there can have been 
no motive for the Incarnation. The whole 
ecclesiastical scheme of salvation with all its 
miraculous appurtenances apparently falls to 
the ground. This is a vital point. 



MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 167 

In the story of the Star of the Nativity 
primitive astronomy and astrology are involved. 
It is useless to attempt scientific explana- 
tions, such as a remarkable conjunction of 
the planets, or the temporary appearance 
and sudden extinction of a star. The Magi, 
as astrologers, recognize the star of Christ; 
it moves before them as a guide, regardless 
of the general march of planets or the sidereal 
system, and stops over the cradle in which 
the child of destiny lies. 

There is one class of the miraculous evi- 
dences respecting which we have undoubtedly 
the means of forming our own judgment. 
We can tell whether there was really a 
miraculous fulfilment of Hebrew prophecies 
in the history of Jesus. To the alleged 
prophecy that Christ should be called a 
Nazarene, there is nothing whatsoever corre- 
sponding in the Old Testament. Apologists, 
after trying such expedients as the identifica- 
tion of Nazarene with Nazarite, which even 
if it were feasible would help them but 
little, Christ having fulfilled none of the 
conditions of a Nazarite, are fain to give up 



168 MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 

the problem in despair. But once more it 
must be said that we cannot pick and 
choose. Our assurance of the miraculous 
fulfilment of an Old Testament prophecy in 
this and the other cases is the same, while it 
is impossible to think that the Holy Spirit 
would either purposely misquote or lapse into 
involuntary misquotation. In Matthew xxi. 
5-7, the supposed fulfilment of the prophecy 
is founded upon a literary error into which 
a writer acquainted with Hebrew literature 
could hardly have fallen. The "ass" and the 
"colt, the foal of an ass," are in the Hebrew 
not two things but two expressions for the 
same thing, and we have before us not only 
a misconstruction, but, as it is hardly possible 
that Jesus could have ridden at once upon 
the ass and upon the foal, a probable adapta- 
tion of the history to the fulfilment of the 
supposed prophecy. The same may be said 
with regard to the alleged fulfilment of the 
Scripture in John xix. 24, where the words 
of the Psalm, "They parted my garment 
among them, and upon my vesture did they 
cast lots," are taken as denoting two actions, 



MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 169 

when they are a double expression, after the 
manner of Hebrew poetry, for one. "I called 
my son out of Egypt," as it stands in Hosea 
xi. 1, can by no ingenuity be referred to any- 
thing but the Exodus, not to mention the 
strong suspicion which here again is raised 
of a story framed to correspond with the sup- 
posed prophecy. " Behold a virgin shall con- 
ceive and bear a son," in Isaiah vii. 14, is 
evidently a sign given by the prophet in 
relation to a crisis of contemporary history, 
and has plainly not the remotest connection 
with the immaculate conception of Jesus. 
Messianic predictions, such as "The sceptre 
shall not depart from Judah nor the ruler's 
staff from between his feet until Shiloh come, 
and unto him shall the obedience of the 
peoples be," not only were not fulfilled but 
were contradicted by the history of Jesus, 
who was not a temporal ruler or deliverer, 
and was therefore not recognized as the Mes- 
siah by the Jews. None in short of the 
so-called prophecies will be found to be 
more than applications, and many of them as 
applications are far fetched. This is true 



170 MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 

even of the most remarkable of the number, 
the description of the oppressed and sorrow- 
ing servant of Jehovah, in Isaiah liii. 3, 
the author of which cannot be said to have 
distinctly foretold anything in the history 
of Jesus, even if we take Jesus to have 
been so preeminently a man of sorrows, a 
point on which a word will be presently 
said. In no single case can Jesus, or 
any event of his life, be said to have been 
present to the mental eye of the prophet. In 
fact, divines of the more rationalistic school 
are retiring from the ground of miraculous 
prophecy to that of ethical application, a 
movement parallel to that which they are 
performing in the case of the miracles by 
substituting natural causes, as far as they 
can, for divine interruption of the course of 
nature. But applications, even if they are 
apposite, are not prophecies. A similar set 
might probably be framed for almost any 
marked character of history in a nation pos- 
sessed of an ancient literature. On this ques- 
tion, as on that of miracles, orthodoxy retreats, 
covering its movement with language which, 



MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 171 

while it renounces inspiration, clings with- 
out any definite reason to the belief in some- 
thing which is not human but divine. 

The martyrdoms of the apostles, it has been 
said, are testimony of the miracles, since 
without the assurance of the miracles the 
pains of martyrdom would not have been 
faced. This history contradicts. To say noth- 
ing of the persecutions endured under Nero 
and Diocletian, when belief in miracles still 
lived, we have instances in abundance at 
the time of the Reformation of martyrdom 
undergone for the doctrine of the reformers, 
though no miracles were even alleged to have 
taken place. Nor are such cases confined to 
the Christian pale. The sect of the Babis in 
Persia has in recent times undergone the most 
cruel persecution, not only without the sup- 
port of miracles but for a faith which Chris- 
tians pronounce false. Servetus died for 
Socinianism, and Giordano Bruno for scep- 
ticism. St. Paul endured a life of martyr- 
dom, but evidently it was for love of Christ 
and for the faith. That Christ had risen was 
an essential part of his faith, and it is in this 



172 MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 

aspect, rather than as a confirmatory miracle, 
that it presents itself to the mind of Paul. 

No man of comprehensive mind, unless it 
be Renan in his dealing with the raising of 
Lazarus, has taken the miracles for creations 
I of fraud. They are the offspring of a child- 
I like fancy in a totally uncritical age. They 
. are a halo which naturally grew round the 
I head of the adored Teacher and Founder, as 
I it grew round the head of every mediaeval 
I saint. That world teemed with miracle, both 
divine and diabolical. Jesus himself is rep- 
resented as recognizing miracles of both 
kinds. He challenges his opponents to say, 
\ if he by Beelzebub casts out devils, by whom 
\ do their sons cast them out. Instead of a 
disposition to criticise, there was a domi- 
nant predisposition to accept. If in the 
country of Descartes highly educated men 
could believe in the miracles wrought at the 
tomb of the saintly Deacon Paris, how much 
more easily could Galilean peasants, or sim- 
ple-minded disciples of whatever race, believe 
in the miracles ascribed, perhaps long after 
his death, to Jesus? Dr. Arnold asked 



MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 173 

whether it was possible that there should be 
myths in the age of Tacitus. The age of 
Tacitus it was, but not the country; though 
even in the country of Tacitus miraculous 
signs attended the births or deaths of Caesars, 
and Tacitus himself records miracles reported 
to have been performed by Vespasian, in 
which, however, nobody believes. The Jews 
were further prepared for the acceptance of 
fresh miracles by their traditional acceptance 
of those of the Old Testament. So devoid 
were they of any conception of natural law, | 
or of anything except a direct action of Deity, | 
that with them a miracle would hardly be \ 
miraculous. 

If we must resign the miracles, the Mes- 
sianic prophecies with their supposed fulfil- 
ment in Christ, and the Trinitarian creed, 
what remains to us of the Gospel? There 
remain to us the Character, the sayings, and 
the parables, which made and have sustained 
moral, though not ritualistic, dogmatic, or 
persecuting, Christendom. There remain 
the supremacy of conscience over law and 
the recognition of motive as that which 



174 MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 

determines the quality of action. The 
character is only impaired as the model 
and guiding star of humanity by supposing 
that it was preterhuman. We cannot even 
conceive the union of two natures, divine 
and human, though we may mechanically 
repeat the form of words. The sayings of 
Christ would be not less true or applicable 
if they had been cast ashore by the tide of 
time without anything to designate their 
source. The parable of the prodigal son, 
that of the labourers in the vineyard, or 
that of the Good Samaritan, would touch our 
hearts whoever might be deemed their author. 
There remains, moreover, the ethical beauty 
of the Gospels themselves, unapproachable 
after its kind. Their miracles are miracles 
of mercy, not of destruction, like many of the 
miracles of the Old Testament. When James 
and John propose to perform an Old Testa- 
ment miracle by commanding fire to come 
down from heaven and destroy an inhospita- 
ble village, they are rebuked and told they 
know not of what manner of spirit they are. 
In this sense it may be said that the mira- 



MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 175 

cles confirm the Gospel and the Gospel con- 
firms the miracles. The Inquisition, to justify 
its existence, could find among Christ's words 
none more apposite than "Compel them to 
come in," said by the giver of the feast in 
the parable. The halo of miracle is worthy 
of the figure. If there is a Supreme Being, 
and if he is anywhere manifest in human 
history, it is here. 

A biography of Christ there cannot be. 
There are no genuine materials for it, as 
Strauss truly says. Four compilations of 
legend cannot be pieced together so as to 
make the history of a life. No ingenuity 
can produce a chronological sequence of 
scene such as a biographer requires. The 
"Lives," so called, are merely the four Gos- 
pels cut into shreds, which are forced into 
some sort of order, while, to impart to 
the narrative an air of reality, it is pro- 
fusely decked out with references to local 
scenery, allusions to national customs, and 
Hebrew names. Each biographer gives us 
a Christ according to his own prepossessions; 
Roman Catholic, Anglican, Protestant, or 



176 MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 

Rationalist. The Roman Catholic priest pre- 
. sents him as a living crucifix ; the New York 
minister as a divine preacher. Renan's Life 
of Jesus, though it is exquisite as a work of 
literary art, as a biography is worth no more 
than the rest. It has no critical basis, and 
the facts are arbitrarily selected and arranged 
in virtue of a learned insight which Renan 
supposes himself to possess. Nothing is 
more arbitrary than the selection of the rais- 
ing of Lazarus as an example of pious fraud. 
Nor does Renan 's work escape the idiosyn- 
crasy of the writer. We find in it a touch 
of sentimentality, or even of something ver- 
ging on the sensuous, which bespeaks a 
Parisian hand. 

Did Jesus give himself out or allow his 

followers to designate him as the Messiah? 

It is impossible to tell. All that we can say 

is that his disciples, and not only those 

whose traditions are embodied in the first 

.Gospel, desired to identify him with the hope 

|of Israel and applied or wrested passages of 

I the Old Testament to that intent. With 

^ that object evidently were produced, by two 



MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 111 

different hands, the two genealogies, which 
hopelessly diverge from each other, while one 
of them, by arbitrary erasion, forces the pedi- 
gree into three mystic sections of fourteen 
each; a clear proof that it was not taken 
from any public record, even if we could 
suppose it possible that amid all the convul- 
sions of Judea the record of a peasant's 
pedigree had been preserved. One of the 
genealogies, moreover, includes the mythical 
line of patriarchs between Adam and Abra- 
ham. The Messiahship of Jesus is a ques- 
tion with which we need practically concern 
ourselves no more. The Messiah was a 
dream of the tribal pride of the Jew, to 
which, as to other creations of tribal or 
national pride or fancy, we may bid a long 
farewell. That it should be necessary for 
the redeemer of the Jewish race to trace his 
pedigree to a hero so dear to the national 
heart, though morally so questionable, as 
David, was natural enough; but who can 
believe that this was necessary for the Re- 
deemer of mankind? It is rather lamentable 
to think how much study and thought have 



178 MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 

been wasted in the attempt to establish the 
fulfilment of a Hebrew vision, devoid of 
importance or interest for the rest of the 
human race. 

What was the relation of Christ to Juda- 
ism? His culture manifestly was Jewish; he 
accepted the sacred books of the nation, 
treating the book of Daniel as authentic and 
the story of Jonah as history ; he taught in 
the synagogues; he fulfilled all righteousness 
by his observance of the ceremonial law. He 
^was a reformer and a regenerator, not a revo- 
„^lutionist. It can hardly be doubted that he 
was of pure Jewish race, though the popula- 
tion of Galilee was very mixed and was, on 
that account, despised by the blue blood of 
Jerusalem, while the fabrication of genealo- 
gies seems rather to indicate some misgivings 
on this point. Here, again, we are perplexed 
by the discrepancies among the authorities, 
if authorities they can be called. In some 
places Christ is made to represent himself as 
^ being sent only to the lost sheep of the 
I house of Israel ; as coming not to destroy the 
I law, but to fulfil it and to establish every 



MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 179 

jot and tittle of it for ever; as regarding all 
outside the pale of Judaism in the light of 
dogs, worthy only to eat of the crumbs 
under the Judaic table; as forbidding his 
apostles to enter any city of the Gentiles or 
Samaritans. Elsewhere he selects a Samaritan | 
in contrast to the self-righteous Jew as a 
type of charity, praises the faith of a hea- 
then soldier as greater than any found in 
Israel, and chooses the Samaritan woman as 
the recipient of his highest and most memor- 
able utterance concerning the nature of reli-/ 
gion, while the parables of the prodigal 
son and the labourers in the vineyard seem 
also symbolically to suggest the conversion 
and admission of the Gentiles. / The writer 
of the first Gospel evidently draws one way; 
the writer of the fourth, who betrays a posi- 
tive antipathy to the Jews, the other. What 
is certain is that practically Jesus put con- 
science above the law, even above the law of 
the Decalogue; and in place of the tribal 
and half -local religion of the Jew introduced 
the religion of humanity. For this Judaism 
rejected him, crucified him, and itself, sink- 



180 MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 

ing deeper than ever into its tribalism and 
legalism, remained the enemy of his reli- 
gion and of his brotherhood of man. In the 
I Pauline Epistles we see Christianity detach- 
1 ing itself by a painful effort from Judaism; 
I and we willingly believe that Paul is right 
in holding that the genuine tradition of 
Jesus is on the side of emancipation. 

Did Jesus regard himself or allow himself 
to be regarded as God? Unitarians quote 
strong texts to the contrary. The Trinita- 
rians get their texts chiefly from the fourth 
Gospel, which is manifestly imbued with the 
peculiar views of its writer and his circle. 
In fact, it may be said to be one note of 
the comparatively late composition of that 
Gospel, that time must have elapsed sufficient 
for the Teacher of Galilee to become, first 
divine, and then the Second Person of the 
Trinity and the Alexandrian Logos. It 
seems unlikely that even in those days of 
theosophic reverie the author of the sayings 
and the parables should ever have been led 
by spiritual exaltation or by the adoring love 
of his disciples to form and promulgate such 



MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 181 

a conception of himself. At any rate, we haveK 
done with the Alexandrian Logos, as well as j 
with the paradoxes of the Athanasian Creed. 

We have done, too, for ever with the mixt-j 
ure of Rabbinism and Alexandrian theoso- j 
phy, with which St. Paul has been accused j 
of overlaying the Christian faith. We may \ 
bid farewell to his doctrine of the Atone- 
ment. That doctrine is bound up with the 
belief in the fall of Adam, and the fall of ; 
Adam is now abandoned as a fact even byi 
orthodox theologians, though they would fain | 
substitute for it some lapse of the human 
race from a more perfect state, without any 
proof either of the more perfect state or of 
the lapse. As was said before, if there was 
no Fall, there was no need of an Atonement; 
if no need of an Atonement, there was no 
need of an Incarnation ; and that whole cycle 
of dogma apparently falls to the ground. 

In calling himself the Son of Man Jesus 
might seem to identify himself with a mystic 
figure in Daniel; but the Son of Man is not 
the Son of God, nor is it the Son of a Jew; 
it is a title of humanity. 



182 MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 

From such ethical limitations and peculi- 
arities as cling to the characters and teach- 
ing of philosophers of Athens and Roman 
Stoics, the character and teaching of Jesus 
are essentially free. There is no brand of 
nationality or race to interfere with our 
acceptance of him as pattern and model of 
. humanity. His limitations are those of a 
I peasant of Galilee seeing nothing of modern 
and complex civilization. For Jesus politics 
had no existence; at least, the only political 
relation known to him was that of provincial 
subjection to the military empire of Rome, 
so that all political questions were perfectly 
solved for him when he had said, "Render 
unto Csesar the things which are Caesar's, 
and unto God the things which are God's." 
He saw little of commerce; if he ever 
looked on Tyre and Sidon it was from afar; 
trade, as it showed itself in the money- 
I changers and salesmen of the temple, was 
I revolting to him; from the magnificent 
r buildings of the capital his simplicity seems 
to have recoiled. Art Judea had not, but 
to art he would probably have been in- 



MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 183 

different. To his eye the lily of the field 
was more beautiful than Solomon in all his 
glory, and would have been more beautiful 
than the work of Phidias. Wealth ap- 
peared to him only in the guise of Dives 
with Lazarus lying at his gate, not in its 
more beneficent form; and therefore to him 
wealth seemed in itself unblest and poverty 
in itself blest. His benign influence has | 
been mainly over the individual heart anjJ^J 
in the simple relations of life. Over poll-;? 
tics, commerce, the great world, and civiliza^ 
tion generally his influence, notwithstanding 
national professions and state churches, has 
been far less. The pursuit of wealth has 
been eager among the professed disciples of 
him who preached the Sermon upon the 
Mount, and in the temples of the Prince 
of Peace have been hung up the trophies of 
war. The morality of civil, commercial, and 
social life has, perhaps, rather suffered by , 
the formal profession of an unattainable \ 
standard, and the world has been more evil | 
than it might have been if the ideal of good | 
men had not been withdrawal from an evil '^ 



184 MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 

world. Among the teachings of Jesus re- 
corded in the Gospels, learning, literature, 
and science have no place. To the mind of 
Jesus, had they presented themselves, they 
would probably have seemed entirely alien. 
The simplicity of the child and the spiritual 
insight of poverty were in his eyes superior 
to the wisdom of the wise. In this respect 
his thoroughgoing disciples have generally 
reflected the image of their Master. What 
would St. Francis of Assisi have made of 
European civilization? Other limitations of 
Jesus were his estrangement from domestic 
life with its relations, and the curtailment of 
his experience by an early death. 

To one of low estate in a province 
oppressed by foreign rule, full of misery 
and leprosy, it might well seem that this 
world was evil and the only chance of hap- 
piness for man was by escaping from it to a 
better. There can be no doubt that the pes- 
simist has a right to say that the Gospel is 
with him so far as the present world is con- 
cerned. 

Allowance must be made also for Oriental 



MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 185 

hyperbole. Over-carefulness poisons life; 
but if we literally cared not for the things 
of to-morrow, we and our families should 
starve. The sparrows do not look to Provi- 
dence to feed them; they search for food the 
livelong day themselves. Forgiveness is the 
general principle which even self-interest 
prescribes; but if we were to offer the 
other cheek to the smiter, the other cheek 
would too often be smitten; and if we were 
to forgive all wrong-doers until seventy 
times seven, wrong would fill the world. 
To the brotherhood of men there is a 
rational limit. In our relations to each 
other, if there is something that is fraternal, 
there is something that is not. Competition 
and antagonism are normal facts. The prac- 
tical truth lies somewhere between the view 
of Hobbes and that of the Gospel, though 
with a recognition of the Gospel view as the 
ideal. Justice, with her scales and her 
sword, will keep her place as well as love 
or the enthusiasm of humanity. If the 
aggressor tries to take away your coat, you 
will have, instead of giving him your cloak 



186 MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 

also, to withstand his aggression in the court 
of law or by force. It would be bad for him 
as well as for you if you did not. 

Of the intolerance, persecutions, and reli- 
gious wars which have resulted from dog- 
, matism, on the other hand, the true Jesus is 
I blameless. If anything like narrowness or 
I intolerance is thrust upon him by a dogmatic 
narrator, his own character and the general 
scope of his teaching repel it. His genuine 
teaching clearly was ethical and spiritual, not 
dogmatic. Nor to him can be fairly ascribed 
asceticism, eremitism, the false idea of saint- 
ship as seclusion and self-torture, or the 
hideous array of hospital pathos embodying 
that idea which fills the galleries of mediaeval 
art. His ministry commences at a marriage 
feast and his enemies reproach him with not 
being ascetic. In his character and history 
there is no doubt a large element of sorrow, 
without which he would not have touched 
humanity. Yet we think too much of Jeru- 
salem and of the closing scene with its ago- 
nies, its horrors, and the circle of dark, even 
of dreadful, dogma which has been formed 



MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 187 

around it. We think too little of the preach- 
ing of the Word of life, and of the land in 
which the Word of life was preached. Let 
us sometimes draw a veil over the Cross, 
banish from our imaginations Jerusalem and ; 
its temple reeking with bloody sacrifice, its 
fanatical Judaism, its hypocritical Pharisa- : 
ism, its throng of bigots yelling for a judi- 
cial murder. Let us learn to see the great 
Teacher of humanity in the happy days of 
his mission, while he gathers round him the 
circle of loving disciples and of simple hearts f 

thirsting for the waters of life, in the vil- 
lage synagogue, on the summer hillside or % 
lake shore, amidst the vines and oleanders 
and lilies of Galilee. 



MORALITY AND THEISM 



MORALITY AND THEISM 

Mr. Leslie Stephen, at the conclusion of 
his Science of Ethics^ admits, with his usual 
candour and courage, that one great difficulty 
remains not only unsolved but insoluble. 
"There is," he says, "no absolute coinci- f 
dence between virtue and happiness. I can- 
not prove that it is always prudent to act 
rightly or that it is always happiest to be 
virtuous." In another passage he avows that 
in accepting the altruist theory he accepts, 
as inseparable from it, the conclusion that 
"the path of duty does not coincide with the| 
path of happiness " ; and he compares the 
attempt to establish an absolute coincidence 
to an attempt to square the circle or dis- 
cover perpetual motion. In another passage 
he puts the same thing in a concrete form. 
"The virtuous men," he says, "may be the 
191 



192 MORALITY AND THEISM 

I very salt of the earth, and yet the discharge 

f of a function socially necessary may involve 
their own misery." "A great moral and 

; religious teacher," he adds, "has often been 
a martyr, and we are certainly not entitled 

I to assume either that he was a fool for his 
pains or, on the other hand, that the highest 
conceivable degree of virtue can make mar- 
tyrdom agreeable." We may doubt, in his 
opinion, whether it answers to be a moral 
hero. "In a gross society, where the tem- 
perate man is an object of ridicule and nec- 
essarily cut off from participation in the 
ordinary pleasures of life, he may find his 
moral squeamishness conducive to misery; 
the just and honourable man is made miser- 
able in a corrupt society where the social 
combinations are simply bands of thieves, 
and his high spirit only awakens hatred; and 
the benevolent is tortured in proportion to 
the strength of his sympathies in a society 
where they meet with no return, and where 
he has to witness cruelty triumphant and 
mercy ridiculed as weakness." So that not 
only are men exposed to misery by reason of 



MORALITY AND THEISM 193 

their superiority, but "every reformer who 
breaks with the world, though for the world's 
good, must naturally expect much pain and 
must be often tempted to think that peace 
and harmony are worth buying, even at the 
price of condoning evil." "'Be good if you / 
would be happy ' seems to be the verdict 
even of worldly prudence; but it adds, in an 
emphatic aside, 'Be not too good.'" Of a 
moral hero it is said, that "it may be true 
both that a less honourable man would have 
had a happier life, and that a temporary fall 
below the highest strain of heroism would 
have secured for him a greater chance of 
happiness." Had he given way, "he might 
have made the discovery — not a very rare 
one — that remorse is among the passions 
most easily lived down." Mr. Stephen fully 
recognizes the existence of men "capable of 
intense pleasure from purely sensual gratifi- 
cation, and incapable of really enjoying any 
of the pleasures which imply public spirit, 
or private affection, or vivid imagination"; 
and he confesses that with regard to such 
men the moralist has no leverage whatever. 



194 MORALITY AND THEISM 

The physician has leverage; so has the 
policeman; but it is possible, as Mr. Stephen 
would probably admit, to indulge not only 
covetousness but lust at great cost to others 
without injury to your own health, and with- 
out falling into the clutches of the law. 

The inference from Mr. Stephen's admission 

seems to be that duty is a theistic term. The 

same may be said of its synonyms, moral 

obligation and moral law. We cannot tell 

I whether they are binding on reason unless 

\ we know whether there is a God or some 

A I superior power to impose the law, bestow the 

I reward, and enforce the penalty. We may 

I extend the statement to perfect happiness, 

which, as a state distinct from pleasure, seems 

to imply a guarantee superior to the accidents, 

and a duration uncurtailed by the brevity, of 

mortal life. 

With every man his own interest must be 
paramount, and every man's interest is the 
fulfilment of his strongest desires. As a 
general rule, our desires, seeing that we are 
domestic and social as well as individual, 
may lead us to promote the good of the 



MORALITY AND THEISM 195 

family and of society. But this is not in- 
variably the case, and when it is not the 
case, supposing that there is no God to fix 
his canon against evil-doing, what is there 
to withhold a man from gratifying his de- 
sires at the expense of society, or to make 
his gratification criminal? Napoleon avowed 
that he deliberately excluded from his mind 
thoughts about any world but this, and that 
had he not done so he could not have achieved 
great things. Of the great things which he 
did achieve, his agnosticism was unquestionably 
a condition. But of the great things which the 
Antonines and other Roman Stoics achieved, 
the condition was not less unquestionably the 
ascendancy of thoughts which Napoleon ex- 
cluded. It was not in their case a definite 
religious belief, but it was a belief in a power 
of righteousness and in an assured reward of 
virtue. Observe, too, that Napoleon found it 
necessary, in the interest of political and social 
order, to restore religion. 

"Virtue is the doing good to mankind in 
/ obedience to the will of God and for the 
\ sake of everlasting happiness." So says 



196 MORALITY AND THEISM 

Paley, speaking with his usual directness. 
He omits to note those social and domestic 
desires and necessities of our nature which, 
in themselves, move us to do good to man- 
kind as well for the pleasure of doing good 
as for the hope that good will be done to us 
in turn. Yet it seems impossible to doubt 
that morality, personal and social, but espe- 
cially social, has hitherto largely rested, in 
ordinary minds, on a foundation of religious 
belief, including the belief in another life 
and in future rewards and punishments. 
That foundation is now manifestly giving 
way. Literature teems with the proofs of 
this. So does the conversation of the edu- 
cated classes. So does even apologetic the- 
ology, the attitude of which is generally one 
of concession and retreat, while among large 
bodies of quick-witted mechanics, even in 
England, still more in France and other 
countries, scepticism is undisguised and 
blunt, in France going the length even of 
a comic Life of Christ. It is natural to 
fear that unless a substitute for religion 
can, within a measurable time, be found, a 



MORALITY AND THEISM 197 

period of some moral confusion will ensue.\( 
Philosophers, of course, will be kept right, |o 
not only by their philosophy, but by the char- 
acter which dedication to philosophy implies. 
Nobody expects that they will fall to com- 
mitting murder or adultery; although the 
writer, as he believes, may himself say that 
he has witnessed the case of a highly edu- 
cated mind to which the leap from theism 
to agnosticism proved morally fatal. It is not 
likely that there will be any sudden catas- 
trophe. Society will not fall to pieces. It 
will be held together by the necessity of 
labour, of order, of mutual help and forbear- 
ance, by the domestic and social affections, 
by opinion, by the law and the police. It 
has, in fact, been held together, after a cer- 
tain fashion, in China by these forces with 
little aid from religion. But it does not 
follow that, pending the reparation of the 
basis, society may not undergo a bad quarter | 
of an hour, especially if, in the absence of t 
spiritual aims and of any hopes beyond this 
world, a passionate thirst for pleasure, and 
for the means of obtaining it, should prevail. 



198 MORALITY AND THEISM 

A moral iiiteiTegnum of this kind there actu- 
ally was between the decline of mediseval 
Catholicism and the installation of Protes- 
tantism or reformed Catholicism in its place. 
To that interregnum belong the Borgias, the 
Visconti, Machiavel, and Catherine de Medi- 
cis. The chief of Christendom glories in the 
massacre of St. Bartholomew, and even the 
court of England thinks so lightly of it as to 
continue negotiating with Catherine de Medici 
for a marriage between the queen of England 
and one of Catherine's sons. The present 
vogue of ethical heterodoxy under the guise 
of works of fiction, among other things, is 
surely a symptom of ethical disintegration. 

Benjamin Franklin, describing the effects 

of scepticism on himself and young men of 

his time, says that with religion morality 

gave way at once, even to common honesty 

and common decency, and that it was only 

after much reflection that he began to sus- 

,- pect that wrong was not wrong because it 

I was forbidden, but that it was forbidden be- 

/ cause it was wrong. It is true this was in 

the eighteenth century, and the same effect 



MORALITY AND THEISM 199 

would not be produced on a Franklin now. 
But the masses are not Franklins. They are 
not as capable of reflection now as Franklin 
was in his time, and while they are coming 
up to his level the world may have that bad 
quarter of an hour. 

Even in countries where there is no state 
church, society is still largely organized in 
the form of churches. Philanthropy works 
to a great extent through the churches, and 
so, in some measure, does education. The 
social shock occasioned by the departure of 
religion would, therefore, in itself be severe. 
It is probably the apprehension of this and 
of the social and political consequences of 
atheism, not less than the influence of habit 
on fashion, that leads some, who themselves 
believe no longer, to support the church. 
Even pronounced Positivists have been known 
to give money for this purpose. There is no 
saying, indeed, how much of the apparent,^ 
church-going and contribution to church offer-| 
tories may be merely politic, or how hollow I 
the crust of profession may be. But taking 
the lowest reasonable estimate of religious 



200 MORALITY AND THEISM 

influence, what a void would the departure 
of religion and the closing of the churches 
leave in life! 

/ Again, what is to become of the clergy? 
Here is a great body of the very flower of our 
morality, as well as of our culture, committed 
to a calling the existence of which is bound 

\ up, so far as we can see, certainly with 
theism, if not with supernatural religion. 
Supposing religion to fail, what would the 
clergy do ? Would they transform themselves 
into teachers of ethics and social guides? 
Would they starve? Would some of them 
be drawn into revolution and thus add to the 
seething elements of disturbance? A celibate 
priest is well prepared for adventure, and he 
may hope, however vainly, by throwing him- 
self into a social revolution to found his 
authority anew. Clergymen read and think. 
Must not the mental state of some of them 
already be uneasy? Is not Ritualism itself 

^;^ in some cases the veil of doubt? 

We talk of the moral law, and repeat the 
famous saying of Kant that the two things 
the contemplation of which filled his soul 



MORALITY AND THEISM 201 

with awe, were the moral law and the starry- 
heavens. This implies that the moral law is 
one, and that, with the order of the heavens, 
it is upheld by a power above us. What 
power is there above us if there is no God 
or we have no proof of his existence ? What 
is the moral law? There are certain rules 
of conduct which we must observe in order 
to maintain our health, bodily and mental, to 
keep our affections pure and warm, and to 
enable us to earn our bread. There are other 
rules which we must observe in order to 
secure our domestic happiness. There are 
also rules which we must observe in order 
to secure our welfare as members of society, 
of the commonwealth, of the race. These 
rules play into each other, the preservation 
of our health, for example, being essential to 
our right temper and effective action in all 
the fields; but they are apparently no more 
one or capable of being represented as a self- 
existing authority transcending all individual 
interests, than our care for our own comfort 
in travelling is capable of being represented 
as one with our necessary respect for the 



202 MORALITY AND THEISM 

comfort of our fellow-travellers. The rudi- 
ments of morality have been shown to exist 
in animals, which are as little conscious of 
Kant's moral law as they are of the grandeur 
which fills his soul with awe when he gazes 
on the starry heavens. 

Evolution clearly is not moral. There is 
nothing moral in the struggle for existence 
or in natural selection. This bold evolution- 
ists, such as Haeckel, frankly admit. An 
organism does not regulate its own stage of 
evolution, nor does it select itself or endow 
itself with the strength which will enable it 
to triumph in the struggle for existence. It 
is not answerable for its own propensities, 
which may be those of a philanthropist or 
those of an assassin; of a human being or of 
a tiger. If it survives in the struggle for 
existence its survival must be that of the 
fittest, and therefore its sufficient justifica- 
tion. The ultimate tendency of things may 
be against it, as it is against the propensi- 
ties of tigers, those of the human tiger per- 
haps, as well as those of the tiger of the 
jangle. But this does not make it the duty 



MORALITY AND THEISM 203 

of tlie offensive organism to cooperate in its 
own elimination or to refrain from gratifying 
its natural propensities while it exists. 

So far as social morality depends on the 
sanctity of human life or of humanity gener- 
ally, it can hardly fail to be somewhat threat- 
ened by evolution, which levels men in point 
of origin, and, as some have begun to be- 
lieve, in point of destiny with other animals. 
A German physiologist of the extreme evo- 
lutionary school said to Agassiz that the 
kingdom of science would have really come 
when you could go out and shoot a man for 
the purpose of dissection. "Of course," 
replied Agassiz, "you will take a fine speci- 
men, a Goethe or a Von Humboldt." We 
have still, no doubt, the same tribal interest 
in safeguarding our own species, and this 
will lead us to hang the murderer when we 
catch him. But the murderer who by his 
cunning escapes the gallows, and perhaps 
comes into the enjoyment of wealth out of 
which the life which he has taken would 
have kept him, — why should he feel any 
more remorse than he would have felt if he 



204 MORALITY AND THEISM 

had taken the life of a dog? Let us sup- 
pose, for instance, that the life of a child 
stands between a needy man and a great 
estate; that he puts an end to the child's 
life in such a way as to escape detection, 
enters into the estate, lives a life of ease 
and affluence instead of struggling for bread, 
spends his money well and enjoys the good- 
will of the people among whom he lives; 
why is he to feel remorse, or, if he has a 
twinge of it, why is he not to repress it as 
he would any other unpleasant emotion or 
bodily pain? 

We speak of the brotherhood of man as 
our great security for mutual benevolence 
and our high inducement to virtuous effort. 
But is it an absolute certainty that men are 
brothers? Has science pronounced decisively 
in favour of the unity of the race? Some 
men of science certainly have pronounced on 
the other side. Again, does not brotherhood 
imply a common paternity, and where is the 
common paternity unless we have all a father 
in God? If that idea is set aside, are we 
not as much competitors as brothers? 



MORALITY AND THEISM 205 

If we make of pleasure our ethical criterion, 
how are we to distinguish between one kind 
of pleasure and another, between the pleasure 
of eating the bread which is honestly earned 
and the pleasure of eating the bread which 
is stolen? Those who select as an instance 
of ethical perfection the reciprocal pleasure 
enjoyed by a mother and the child at her 
breast, must exclude from their idea of per- 
fection anything that we should commonly 
call moral, since there is nothing in the 
suckling of a human infant more moral than 
in the suckling of a calf. 

Perfect adaptation, again, would appear 
to fail as an ethical criterion or sanction. 
Adaptation may be, and often is, as perfect 
in the case of means adopted to do ill deeds 
as in the case of means adopted to do good 
deeds. Punctuality, which is selected as an 
instance of adaptation, and on that account 
moral, is shown as much in keeping a crimi- 
nal assignation as in keeping an appoint- 
ment for the best of objects. 

The satisfaction of cooperating with the 
motive power of evolution is tendered as an 



206 MORALITY AND THEISM 

ethical inducement. It \^5ould hardly present 
itself so to beings the elimination of whom 
is a part of the process. Why should a 
mortal sacrifice his enjoyments to the ten- 
dencies, blind tendencies as far as we 
know, of a soulless power or of a power 
which to us manifests no soul? If the pro- 
cess is, as an evolutionary philosopher repre- 
sents it, one of alternating creation and 
destruction, Prometheus might find satisfac- 
tion rather in stopping the process at the 
recommencement of its destructive part than 
in devout cooperation. 

The authors of systems of moral philosophy 
have sought to discover some intellectual 
principle from which all moral rules could 
be logically deduced and the apprehension of 
which would constrain all men to be moral. 
.But the question remains, why men who do 
I not like to be moral, as many men do not, 
are to sacrifice their propensities to a logi- 
cal deduction from an intellectual principle. 
Suppose virtue to correspond, as Clarke says, 
to the fitness of things, why is Borgia to 
prefer the fitness of things to the enjoyment 



MORALITY AND THEISM 207 

of his orgies and to the criminal courses by 
which the means of that enjoyment are to be 
obtained? What is needed to influence the 
actions of men is not an abstract principle 
or a definition, but a motive . It is by | 
renewing and reinforcing the motive power, 
not by defining morality, that the great moral ^ 
reforms and movements have been made. ^' 
Desire of health, of domestic happiness, of 
the esteem and good-v/ill of our fellows, of 
the security for our lives and property which 
we must purchase by reciprocal respect for 
the lives and property of others, and by 
obedience to the laws, are motive powers 
The necessity of obeying the will of God 
with eternal reward or punishment annexed, 
on which Paley founds the inducement to 
virtue, provided the truth of theism can be 
proved, is a motive power of the most over- 
whelming kind. Intellectual perception of the | 
fitness of things is not. 

Systems of ethics founded on the moral taste 
fail in the same way. They cannot show any 
obligation to have the taste, or, in its absence, to 
conform to the peculiarity of those who have it. 



208 MORALITY AND THEISM 

Butler's ethics are founded on the system 
of man's inward frame and the supremacy 
of conscience, which he takes to be manifest, 
in that system. "Appetites, passions, affec- 
tions, and the principle of reflection," he 
■ says, "considered merely as the several parts 
{ of our inward nature, do not at all give us 
;? an idea of the system or constitution of this 
f nature; because the constitution is formed 
by a somewhat not yet taken into considera- 
tion, namely, by the relations which these 
several parts have to each other, the chief 
I of which is the authority of reflection or 
\ conscience." Conscience, he says, if it had 
power as it has authority, would rule the 
world. Whence, then, its lack of power? 
Butler manifestly assumes that man's inward 
frame is regulated by divine ordinance, and 
that conscience is the voice of God. Unless 
it be the voice of God, it is nothing more 
than an index, formed by experience and 
ratified by tradition, to the course of indi- 
vidual action which is best for the commu- 
nity and the raceJ^ If a man cares nothing for 
)$: the community or the race, with him con- 



MORALITY AND THEISM 209 

science can have no authority. Such a man 
will have nothing within him to restrain 
him from sacrificing the happiness and lives | 
of other men without measure to the pro- | 
motion of his own interest or the gratification { 
of his passions. His only restraints, and the 
only restraints of thoroughly selfish men in 
general, will be social influence and, in the \ 
last resort, the penal law. Social influence i 
will be strong in proportion as society is 
well compacted and as the man is by nature 
sensitive to opinion and to the advantages 
of kindly relations with his fellows. Beyond 
this there remains, to control the wicked, 
nothing but the penal law, and the penal 
law may be evaded; cupidity and passion 
will, at least, often hope to evade it; while 
a man of Napoleon's genius and fortunes 
may raise himself entirely above it, as well 
as above the pressure of opinion, and run, 
without fear of punishment, a career of 
slaughter and robbery on the most gigantic 
scale. If he ever feels a twinge of remorse, 
arising from early lessons or the force of 
habit, there seems to be no assignable reason 



V 



210 MORALITY AND THEISM 

why he should not stifle it just as he would 
assuage any bodily ache or pain. 

In such action as is heroic, or involves great 
sacrifice of self, especially, there appears to 
be an element hardly separable from theism, 
whatever allowance we may make for the 
warmth of social feeling and what has been 
called the enthusiasm of humanity. Any- 
thing short of life perhaps we can imagine a 
man would sacrifice from his love of his fel- 
lows and in the hope of winning their love; 
but the sacrifice of life seems to imply the ex- 
istence of a hope beyond. One philosopher 
has even found theism in the devotion of the 
private soldier who is content, with almost 
as little expectation of individual glory as 
of profit, to give his life to the common 
cause. 

A great evolutionist deduced from evo- 
lution the negation of free will and the 
automatism of man. The discovery would 
have been an end of anything that could 
properly be called morality. The deduction, 
however, supposing it logical, would be fatal 
surely, not to free will, but to evolution. 



MORALITY AND THEISM 211 

That man has power over his own actions, 
however limited or qualified that power may 
be, and by whatever name you may choose to 
call it, with the responsibility attendant, is 
surely a fact of human nature no less unde- 
niable than the existence of any one of our 
bodily senses. We may puzzle ourselves over 
it without end, but no one ever practically 
denies it either in his reflections on his own 
actions or in forming his opinion on the 
actions of his neighbours. The whole course 
of life, of society, of law, and of government, 
implies it. Its presence has hitherto repelled 
the attempt to construct a science of history 
analogous to the physical sciences. If any- 
body has ever persuaded himself, nobody has 
ever acted on the persuasion, that the relation 
of the inducement to the action, in him or 
in his neighbours, is as the impact of one 
billiard ball on the other. The feeling of 
free will, indeed, may be roughly described 
as our sense, given us by consciousness, of 
the difference between physical and moral 
causation. 

Mr. Cotter Morison, a man himself of 



X 



212 MORALITY AND THEISM 

moral sensibility as well as the highest 
cultivation, said that the sooner the idea of 
moral responsibility was got rid of the better 
it would be for society and moral education, 
and that while virtue might, and possibly 
would, bring happiness to the virtuous 
man, to the immoral and the selfish virtue 
would probably be the most distasteful or 
even painful thing in their experience, while 
vice would give them unmitigated pleasure.^ 
His method of moral reform is the elimina- 
tion or suppression of the bad. But if the 
bad happen to be the stronger or the more 
cunning, what is to prevent their eliminating 
or suppressing the good? What is to prevent 
their doing this, not only with a clear con- 
science, but with a glow of self-approbation? 
The author of Modern Thinkers, bravely 
pushing agnostic principles to their extreme 
conclusion, says: — 

" It is generally believed to be moral to tell the truth, 
and immoral to lie. And yet it would be difficult to 
prove that nature prefers the true to the false. Every- 

1 See The Service of Man, by James Cotter Morison, pp. 
293-314. 



MORALITY AND THEISM 213 

where she makes the false impression first, and only 
after years, or thousands of years, do we become able 
to detect her in her lies. . . . Nature endows almost | 
every animal with the faculty of deceit in order to aidf 
it in escaping from the brute force of its superiors. Why, 
then, should not man be endowed with the faculty of 
lying when it is to his interest to appear wise concern- 
ing matters of which he is ignorant? Lying is often a 
refuge to the weak, a stepping-stone to power, a ground 
of reverence toward those who live by getting credit for 
knowing what they do not know. No one doubts that it 
is right for the maternal partridge to feign lameness, a 
broken wing or leg, in order to conceal her young in 
flight, by causing the pursuer to suppose he can more 
easily catch her than her offspring. From whence, then, 
in nature, do we derive the fact that a human being may 
not properly tell an untruth with the same motive? Our 
early histories, sciences, poetries, and theologies are all 
false, yet they comprehend by far the major part of 
human thought. Priesthoods have ruled the world by^^' 
deceiving our tender souls, and yet they command our 
most enduring reverence. Where, then, do we discover 
that any law of universal nature prefers truth to false- 
hood, any more than oxygen to nitrogen, or alkalies to 
salts? So habituated have we become to assume that 
truth-telling is a virtue, that nothing is more difficult 
then to tell how we came to assume it, nor is it easy of 
proof that it is a virtue in an unrestricted sense. What 
would be thought of the military strategist who made V" 
no feints, of the advertisement that contained no lie, of v..- 
the business man whose polite suavity covered no false- 
hood? \, 



214 MORALITY AND THEISM 

" Inasmuch as all moral rules are in the first instance 
impressed by the strong, the dominant, the matured, and 
the successful upon the weak, the crouching, the infantile, 
and the servile, it would not be strange if a close analysis 
and a minute historical research should concur in prov- 
ing that all moral rules are doctrines established by the 
strong for the government of the weak. It is invariably 
the strong who require the weak to tell the truth, and 
always to promote some interest of the strong. . . . 

" ' Thou shalt not steal ' is a moral precept invented 
by the strong, the matured, the successful, and by them 
impressed upon the weak, the infantile, and the failures 
in life's struggle, as all criminals are. For nowhere in 
the world has the sign ever been blazoned on the shop 
doors of a successful business man, ' Closed because the 
proprietor prefers crime to industry.' Universal society 
might be pictured, for the illustration of this feature of 
the moral code, as consisting of two sets of swine, one of 
which is in the clover, and the other is out. The swine 
that are in the clover grunt, ' Thou shalt not steal ; put 
up the bars.' The swine that are out of the clover grunt, 
'Did you make the clover? let down the bars.' 'Thou 
shalt not steal' is a maxim impressed by property holders 
upon non-property holders. It is not only conceivable, 
but it is absolute verity, that a sufficient deprivation of 
property, and force, and delicacy of temptation, would 
compel every one v/ho utters it to steal, if he could get 
an opportunity. In a philosophic sense, therefore, it is 
not a universal, but a class, law; its prevalence and 
I obedience indicate that the property holders rule society, 
which is itself an index of advance toward civilization. 
No one would say that if a lion lay gorged with his ex- 



MORALITY AND THEISM 215 

cessive feast amidst the scattered carcass of a deer, and a 
jaguar or a hyena stealthily bore away a haunch thereof, 
the act of the hyena was less virtuous than that of the 
lion. How does the case of two bushmen, between whom 
the same incident occurs, differ from that of the two 
quadrupeds? Each is doing that which tends in the 
highest degree to his own preservation, and it may be 
assumed that the party against whom the spoliation is 
committed is not injured at all by it. Among many 
savage tribes theft is taught as a virtue, and detection )^ 
is punished as a crime. . . . Having control of the 
forces of society, the strong can always legislate, or 
order, or wheedle, or preach, or assume other people's 
money and land out of their possession into their own, 
by methods which are not known as stealing, since in- 
stead of violating the law they inspire and create the law. 
But if the under dog in the social fight runs away with a 
bone in violation of superior force, the top dog runs after* 
him bellowing, '■ Thou shalt not steal,' and all the other: 
top dogs unite in bellowing, 'This is divine law and notf 
dog law' ; the verdict of the top dog, so far as law, re- 
ligion, and other forms of brute force are concerned, 
settles the question. But philosophy will see in this 
contest of antagonistic forces, a mere play of opposing 
elements, in which larceny is an incident of social weak- 
ness and unfitness to survive, just as debility and leprosy 
are; and would as soon assume a divine command, 
'Thou shalt not break out in boils and sores,' to the 
weakling or leper, as one of 'Thou shalt not steal' to 
the failing struggler for subsistence. So far as the irre- 
sistible promptings of nature may be said to constitute a 
divine law, there are really two laws. The law to him 



216 MORALITY AND THEISM 

who will be injured by stealing is, ' Thou shalt not steal,' 
meaning thereby, ' Thou shalt not suffer another to steal 
from you.' The law to him who cannot survive without 
stealing is simply, ' Thou shalt, in stealing, avoid being 
detected.' 

" So the laws forbidding unchastity were framed by 
those who, in the earlier periods of civilization, could 
afford to own women, for the protection of their property 
rights in them, against the poor who could not. . . . 
We do not mean, by this course of reasoning, to imply 
that the strong in society can, or ought to be, governed 
by the weak : that is neither possible, nor, if possible, 
would it be any improvement. We only assert that 
moral precepts are largely the selfish maxims expressive 
of the will of the ruling forces in society, those who have 
health, wealth, knowledge, and power, and are designed 
wholly for their own protection and the maintenance of 
their power. They represent the view of the winning 
side, in the struggle for subsistence, while the true in- 
terior law of nature would represent a varying combat in 
which two laws would appear, viz. : that known as the 
moral or majority law, and that known as the immoral or 
minority law, which commands a violation of the other." ^ 

Happily, the strong and the weak are not 
two distinct sets of men. They are blended 
together in society, by the common interests 
and general opinion of which the strong in 
the exercise of their strength are practically 

1 Modern Thinkers, by Van Buren Denslow, pp. 240-246. 



MORALITY AND THEISM 217 

controlled. Men who are strong in one way 
are very often weak in others ; men who are 
weak in one way are strong in others ; and 
there are innumerable gradations of every kind 
of strength. 

This, however, is free thought expressed 
with a vigour and frankness for which in- 
quirers after truth will be thankful. It is 
curious, as an indication of the tendencies of 
the philosophy to which it relates, and as a re- 
ply to the historical scepticism which refuses 
to believe that the teaching of the Sophists 
really was what it is represented to have 
been by Socrates or Plato. It would also 
seem to be a conclusive answer to those 
who utterly deride the apprehension of a 
moral interregnum, and feel confident that 
society is going to sail, without interruption 
or disturbance of its rule of conduct, out of y 
the zone of theistic into that of scientific 
morality. It suggests that between one state \r 
and the other there may be an interval in 
which the question will be not so much be- 
tween the moral and the immoral, as between ^ 
the "top and the under dog." 



218 MORALITY AND THEISM 

The Marquis of Steyne is an organism, 
and, like all other organisms, so long as he 
succeeds in maintaining himself against com- 
peting organisms, is able to make good his 
title to existence under the law of natural 
selection. He has his pleasures; they are 
not those of a St. Paul, or a Shakespeare, or 
a Wilberforce, but they are his. They make 
him happy, according to the only measure of 
happiness which he can conceive; and if he 
is cautious, as a sagacious voluptuary will 
be, they need not diminish his vitality, they 
may even increase it both in duration and 
intensity, though they may play havoc with 
the welfare of a number of victims and 
dependants. He may successively seduce a 
score of women without bad consequences to 
himself. Why is he doing wrong? In the 
name of what do you peremptorily summon 
him to return to the path of virtue? In the 
name of altruistic pleasure? He happens to 
be one of those organisms which are not 
capable of it. In the name of a state of 
society which is to come into existence long 
after he has mouldered to dust in the family 



MORALITY AND THEISM 219 

mausoleum of the Gaunts ? His reply will be 
that as a sensible man he lives for the present, 
not for a future in which he will have no 
share. Suppose you could induce him to try 
a course of virtue, or of altruism if the term 
is more scientific, what in his case would be 
the practical result? Would it not be a 
painful conflict between passion and con- 
science, or perhaps, in the terms of the 
now current philosophy, between presented 
sensations on the one hand, and represented 
or re-represented sensations on the other? 
Is it not probable that he would end his 
days before that conflict had been brought 
to a close? Its fruits, however imperfect, 
would, of course, be both happy and precious 
in the estimation of theism; but in the esti- 
mation of any ethical philosophy founded on 
pleasure and pain, what could they be but 
pleasure, unquestionable pleasure, lost, and 
pain, pain of a distressing kind, incurred? 
So with other organisms, which, as thorough- 
going evolutionism would lead us to think, 
are pursuing their congenial, though conven- 
tionally reprobated, walks of life. The assas- 



220 MORALITY AND THEISM 

sin, the robber, and the sharper have their 
status in nature, as well as any other members 
of the predatory tribes. It is laid down that 

!the life and interest of the social organism 
must rank above the lives and interests of its 
I component particles, the individual men, and 
■^ form the measure of their desires and actions. 
This, however, would seem to be an arbitrary 
assumption, and one on which morality can- 
not be firmly founded. Can the term ''organ- 
ism" itself be applied to society otherwise 
than in a metaphorical or imperfect sense? Of 
the particles of which society consists, each, 
unlike the particles of a true organism, has a 
consciousness and a unit of its own. Further 
enforcement at least is needed. 
^/ Apprehension of a temporary disturbance 

S of social order, however, or even of an 
\ ... 

\ \ ethical interregnum, is not our highest motive 

(^ for desiring to know whether the universe 

is guided by a Providence or borne blindly 

on by a material evolution, and whether 

there is or is not a supreme power on the 

/ side of virtue. No question surely can be 

more practical than these, unless we are con- 



I 



MORALITY AND THEISM 221 

tent to be as the beasts that perish; a fate 
to which probably few are deliberately re- 
signed, however, amidst the business or the 
enjoyments of life we may put aside the 
thought of our mortality. 

In what position then, since the discovery 
of evolution or, as we should rather say, to 
avoid building too much on a particular 
theory, since the recent revelations of sci- 
ence, is the theistic hypothesis left? 

Clearly, there is an end of our faith, so far 
as cosmogony is concerned, in the sacred 
books of the Hebrews, from which our no- 
tions of creation and the Creator have 
hitherto been largely derived. Those books 
must now be placed on the same shelf with 
the sacred books of other races. They are 
superior to their fellows no doubt, not only 
in loftiness of imagination, but in compara- 
tive approach to scientific truth, especially in 
regard to the great fact of the unity of crea- 
tion, which astronomy and spectrum-analy- 
sis have confirmed. It is in virtue of this 
superiority that they have so long retained 



222 MORALITY AND THEISM 

their hold upon our minds. But their narra- 
tive of creation is hopelessly at variance 
with scientific fact, while the authority of 
some of them as the alleged works of Moses, 
even if it could give them a title to accept- 
ance as records of events anterior to the 
existence of man, has been totally over- 
thrown. The poetry of the Hebrew books 
will never die. Of their cosmogony we 
must, once for all, clear our minds. We are 
in the position of the philosophers of Greece 
when, having emancipated themselves from 
the legendary cosmogony of the polytheistic 
religion of the state, they faced with open 
minds the problem of existence. 

With belief in a first cause the theory of 
evolution need not interfere. Evolution can- 
not have evolved itself. It is a mode or 
process, not a creative force. Some power 
there must have been, if we can trust the 
indications of our intelligence on such a 
subject, to set evolution on foot and to 
direct it in its course. Those who think to 
account for all things by the hypothesis of 
a vast alternation between homogeneity and 



MORALITY AND THEISM 223 

heterogeneity stand in need of a prime 
motor; otherwise, whichever of the alternate 
processes they take postulates the other as 
its antecedent, and so backwards to infinity. 
In plain language, they must have something 
to set the see-saw going. If this objection 
is said to be rather metaphysical, the answer 
is that a hypothesis, before it can be applied 
to facts, must be shown to be intelligible 
and tenable in itself; a condition not ful- 
filled by a hypothesis of original alternation. 

It may be that evolution, as some say, 
gives us a worthier idea of the majesty of 
the Deity, who, instead of perpetual inter- 
vention, has, once for all, commanded his 
agents, and endowed them with, the power, 
to work out the universal plan. At the 
same time the Deity seems to be removed to 
an immeasurable distance from us. It is 
difficult to understand how we can retain 
the practice of prayer, at least for anything 
material. Belief in special providence evolu- 
tion seems absolutely to preclude. 

The old proof of the existence of a Deity, 
which satisfied Paley and the authors of the 



224 MORALITY AND THEISM 

Bridgewater treatises, was the design assumed 
to be visible in creation. But what is visi- 
ble in creation is not design; it is only 
adaptation, from which we are not warranted 
in directly inferring design. Adapted to 
each other things must have been; otherwise 
the world could not have come into exist- 
ence, or, when it had come into existence, 
have held together. The arrangement of the 
vertebrse is necessary to the support of the 
skull. The position of the pebble beneath is 
necessary to the support of the pebble above, 
though we do not take the adaptation for 
a proof of design. We have no other world 
to compare with this, and, therefore, no 
means of learning what could come by chance 
or blind evolution and what could not. 
Paley's man who finds the watch is able to 
compare it with unwrought matter. He 
knows that human artificers exist. He is a 
man himself and can recognize the work of 
his fellow. 

The argument from design has been turned 
on the upholders by the opponents of theism. 
It has been said that contrivance is human 



MORALITY AND THEISM 225 

and inconsistent with our ideas of omnipo- 
tence, which would produce perfection at 
once by fiat. But here we are simply beyond 
the range of our intelligence. We cannot 
divine which way Deity would take to its 
ends. There is nothing repugnant to reason 
in the belief that what presents itself to our 
minds as effort and a struggle towards per- 
fection, rather than perfection by fiat, may 
be the course chosen b}^ the Master of the 
universe and form its law. On the other 
hand, it is evident that Paley's analogy 
breaks down again in this respect, that God 
is not like a mechanic, showing his skill by 
his handling of matter, which, with its quali- 
ties and its resistance, is given to him from 
without. He is himself the Creator of the 
matter with which he deals. 

Science, it is true, frequently uses teleo- 
logical language, language such as implies 
design. But from this little can be inferred, 
except that our established phraseology is 
theistic and that science falls involuntarily 
into the use of the familiar terms. 

From mere inspection of the universe we 



226 MORALITY AND THEISM 

can only infer the existence of such a Deity 
as the universe, including the nature of 
man, discloses. This seems to be justly 
urged by Hume; and a mere inspection of 
the universe, at least of our part of it, can 
hardly be said to disclose a moral Creator. 
The Creator disclosed is one who sends not 
only his sunshine and his rain, but his earth- 
quakes, his plagues, and his famines, alike 
upon the just and the unjust; who takes 
away by death the good man from the house- 
hold which loves him and depends on him for 
bread, as well as the wicked man from his 
den of crime; who, both among human beings 
and among brutes, seems to scatter pain and 
misery broadcast. What we see and experi- 
ence may be, and probably is, but a faint 
glimpse of the universal plan. But from 
what we see and experience the combination 
of omnipotence with beneficence, as we con- 
ceive the one or the other, cannot be inferred. 
For their ultimate union we must look behind 
the veil. True, human effort is repaid, but 
it is human. 

In our own planet waste, wreck, and abor- 



MORALITY AND THEISM 227 

tion hold divided empire with economy, per- 
fection, and fruitfulness. In our satellite, 
the telescope tells us, they reign alone. 
Nothing apparently warrants us in assuming 
that the character of the Creator is reflected 
by one side of creation, not by the other. 

Pessimism may be said to be the reverie 
of disappointment and satiety, with an infu- 
sion of Byronic sentiment and of the melan- 
choly of Schopenhauer and Leopardi. But it 
has, at all events, been able to show that 
the theological optimism against which it 
revolts is only less irrational than itself. 
It has, at all events, put an end to the 
attempts of the complacent optimist to vindi- 
cate the Creator and establish the theistic , 
hypothesis by representing pain, suffering, | 
and evil generally as mere negation. To 
give that pious legerdemain its death-blow 
a Lisbon earthquake, a famine, or a pes- 
tilence is not needed. A toothache will p 
suffice. "™" 

Neither from sense nor from science can 
we be said to have actual proof of the 
existence of intelligence other than our 



228 MORALITY AND THEISM 

own, or even of any life other than that 
which exists on our planet. Such is the 
fact. But the mere statement of it seems to 
carry the conviction that the range of our 
senses, even with the aid of science and all 
its instruments, must be narrow. It is in- 
conceivable that we should be the sole con- 
scious denizens of the universe. As has 
been said before, there is no reason for the 
presumption that the information of our 
senses, or of science, which draws its know- 
ledge from the senses, is exhaustive. We are 
in a universe our knowledge of which is 
probably mere purblindness. Gravitation is 
only a fact observed but unexplained. Mind 
itself, as it is in us, may not be ultimate. . 

It seems impossible to imagine our intelli- 
gence, whatever the mode of its development, 
is without an intelligent author. 

Science shows that the universe, so far as 
it falls within our vision, is pervaded and 
ruled by a single power, which, as its opera- 
tions reveal themselves to our minds, we 
cannot help divining to be a mind. Mono- 
theism is at all events perfectly consistent 



MORALITY AND THEISM 229 

with the results of physical science; while 
with polytheism science has done away. 
Hence, science and religion, even the most 
fervent religion, have been able to dwell 
together in the intellects of Newton and 
Faraday. 

In metaphysical arguments there is little 
comfort. Anselm thought that he had proved 
the existence of a Deity by the argument 
that our notion of the Deity was perfection 
and that perfection implied existence. Des- 
cartes reproduced the argument substantially 
under a different form. Existence must enter 
into our notion of a centaur or a griffin, and 
is, in those cases, notional only, affording no 
proof that the thing of which we think is 
real. To all proofs of the existence of God 
derived from supposed mental necessity, it 
seems to be a sufficient answer that belief 
in God has been, and is, absent from some 
minds otherwise sound and normal. These 
seem like relics of the scholastic fancy that 
the mind is a casket containing in itself 
knowledge about the universe which is ca- 
pable of b^ing educed by a logical process 



230 MORALITY AND THEISM 

apart from observation of the universe itself. 
Nothing metaphysical has ever taken much 
hold on general intelligence or exerted much 
influence on practical faith. A fervent reli- 
gion, metaphysically kindled, or even a lively 
conception of the character of the Deity de- 
rived from metaphysical speculation, it would 
surely be hard to find. 

Intuitionists would settle the question by 
laying it down that there are always present 
in intelligence, whether developed or nas- 
cent, three ideas; consciousness of the world, 
consciousness of self, and consciousness of 
God. As has been already said, there are 
men who, if they know the contents of their 
own intelligence, are without a consciousness 
of God. Can this intuition of a Deity be 
proved to exist in the mind quite indepen- 
dently of any notion derived from without 
either through education or tradition? If it 
can, we may accept it as decisive. If it can- 
not, its testimony fails. We need not go on 
to ask what sort of Deity it is that is thus 
intuitively revealed, that of Jehovah, that of 
Jupiter, that of Allah, that of the All- 



MORALITY AND THEISM 231 

Father presented by the teachings of Jesus, 
an amalgam of them all, or a cold and filmy 
abstraction. 

On the other hand, there can be no doubt 
as to the historical importance of the reli- 
gious sense in man, or as to the failure of 
some of the attempts of evolutionists to 
wrest the history of religion into conformity 
with their system. The source of religion 
has been found in dreams about departed 
chieftains. It would be curious to see the 
connection traced between such dreams and 
the religion of Jesus, or that of Bacon, Pas- 
cal, Butler, and Newton. Did all primeval 
men dream about departed chieftains ? How 
did the religious tendency become universal? 
How could a dream lead even to the most 
primitive forms of worship, such as the 
adoration of the sun? That religion began 
in fetish-worship is a theory held by phi- 
lology to be precarious. That its primitive 
form was a worship of the powers of nature, 
especially of those which most influence the 
life of man, and of the sun above all, may 
be taken to be true; but this accounts only 



232 MORALITY AND THEISM 

for the selection of objects, not for the exist- 
ence of the sentiment itself. We can hardly 
imagine that the grandeur and powers of 
nature produce any sentiment of awe or ten- 
dency to worship in animals. Neither in the 
primitive direction of the religious sentiment 
nor in its aberrations, brutish or cruel as 
some of them were, is there anything to 
repel the suggestion that it had its source 
in reality and betokens a connection between 
humanity and the Spirit of the Universe. 

Paley may have been right in saying that 
the Deity could reveal himself only in mira- 
cle. If he does not reveal he may yet mani- 
fest himself without miracle through human 
nature and history, through the discoveries 
of science and by other than supernatural 
means. If there is a Deity, the reasonable 
presumption surely is that he will manifest 
himself to creatures capable of receiving the 
manifestation. His counsel may be that 
instead of his revealing himself to us, we 
should feel after him and find him. 

Rational theology has, perhaps, hardly taken 
sufficient notice of our sense of beauty in its 



MORALITY AND THEISM 233 

different grades, from the sublimity of the 
star-lit heaven to the loveliness of the hum- 
ming-bird, or of the poetry and art which 
are the expressions of that sense. It would 
be difficult to account for beauty, or the 
sense of beauty, by physical evolution, while 
their presence and the charm which they \ 
throw over life seem to bespeak a certain | 
tenderness on the part of the Being in whose \ 
power we are which softens the stern aspect | 
of evolution. The same may be said of the f 
poetic element in man, which as yet no one | 
has undertaken to trace to physical evolu- 1 
tion; of the sentimental love, which is notl 
essential to procreation; and of the moral 
beauty, which, though connected, is not iden- | 
tical with practical usefulness. Adaptation 
is produced by evolution ; but it is only in a 
secondary sense that we call adaptation beau- 
tiful. Darwin's loss of taste for poetry and 
art is remarkable; he seems to have felt it as 
a defect and as the atrophy of an essential 
part of his nature, not as the necessary result 
of devotion to scientific truth. 

Man's notion of God has risen from nature- 



234 MORALITY AND THEISM 

worship, it may be from fetishism, to the 
conception of the Heavenly Father who is 
the idealization of our own moral nature. 
Anthropomorphism still clings to our theism; 
the very name of Father involves it; so do 
those of Benefactor and Judge; nor can we 
think of a personal God without importing 
human personality into the idea. But a short- 
coming in our power of conception does not 
prove the object of our thoughts to be unreal. 
We fail to conceive infinity, yet we are sure 
that the universe is infinite. For the purpose 
of natural theology and especially of inquiries 
like the present, it might be well to say Power 
or Soul of the Universe instead of God. 

Of the attempts to construct for us a reli- 
gion without a God, it may surely be said 
that they serve only to show the tenacity of 
the religious sentiment and the void which 
is left in the heart by the departure of reli- 
gion. Of the Comtist Religion of Humanity 
we have spoken already. We have only to 
ask once more how it is possible for us 
to bow down in adoration to an abstraction 
which is insensible to our worship. An 



MORALITY AND THEISM 235 

abstraction, in fact, Comte's Great Being 
must be; it cannot even have so much sub- 
stance as there would be in a generalization, 
since, history being unfinished, the basis for 
the generalization is incomplete. The Posi- 
tivist ritual and calendar, which are a fanci- 
ful reproduction of Catholicism, appear to 
have taken little hold compared with the 
philosophic part of the system; while even 
the philosophic part has taken hold less as 
a scientific solution than as a negation of 
the theistic view. The alleged account of 
history as a succession of theistic, metaphysi- 
cal, and Positivist conceptions of the universe 
cannot be verified by facts, which fail espe- 
cially in respect to the metaphysical period. 
The Founder of the Religion of Humanity 
believed in the finality of his own system, 
assuming that progress had reached its com- 
pletion in it, and that he could cast society 
into its final mould. The limits which he 
undertook to set to human knowledge have, 
in one direction, already been overpast. Sup- 
posing his theory of the three periods, the 
theistic, the metaphysical, and the positive, 



236 MORALITY AND THEISM 

were true, how could he tell that Positivism 
was the last birth of time or that destiny 
might not have a fourth period, possibly 
X even a reversion to theism in store? 

Of Spiritualism little need be said. It 
testifies to the craving of mankind for some- 
thing beyond sense, and for something to fill 
up the blank left by the failure of religious 
faith, as well as to the desire of renewing 
communion with the lost objects of affection. 
It can hardly be admitted even to have a 
good title to its name, since the dead are 
made to "materialize," and to use material 
instruments of communication. 

Nor can it be necessary to dwell on the 
different kinds of mysticism in which soli- 
taries or small circles have taken refuge, 
thinking that by seclusion they can shut out 
the evil world, or soar above it by spiritual 
ecstasy. We are not in Asia; and Lamaism, 
though Schopenhauer would commend to us 
something like it, with universal self-efface- 
ment in prospect as the ultimate paradise, is 
not likely to afford satisfaction here. 

Others, Seeley, for instance, would give us, 



MORALITY AND THEISM 237 

as a substitute for definite belief in God, a 
religion of enthusiastic admiration. "The 
words 'religion' and 'worship,'" says Seeley, 
"are commonly and conveniently appropriated 
to the feelings with which we regard God; 
but these feelings, love, awe, admiration, 
which together make up worship, are felt in 
various combinations for human beings and 
even for inanimate objects." "It is not," he 
says, "exclusively, but only par excellence^ 
that religion is directed towards God." Re- 
ligion he elsewhere describes as "that higher 
life of man which is sustained by admira- 
tion," adding that "it has its essence in wor- 
ship or some kind of enthusiastic contempla- 
tion seeking for expression in outward acts." 
If such is the origin of art, he is prepared 
to call art religion. Enthusiastic nationality 
with him is religion. He, and perhaps not 
he alone, makes of the nation a god. This 
surely is mere playing with words or worse; 
it is an attempt to cheat us into the impres- 
sion that we have a religious belief when we 
have none. The objects of admiration, social, 
scientific, or aesthetic, however salutary or 



238 MORALITY AND THEISM 

elevating may be their influence, are not a 
Father in heaven. Ask the widow with her 
fatherless children whether they are. Nor 
does the culture necessary for these lofty and 
refined emotions extend, or bid fair within 
any calculable time to extend, to the masses 
of the people. A clown who cannot read or 
write and who earns his bread by the coarsest 
work can take in the idea of God and of 
divine rewards and punishments as thor- 
oughly as Professor Seeley with all his cult- 
ured capacity for admiration. But it would 
be difficult to infuse into the clown a reli- 
gion of national aggrandizement or of art. 

" Cosmic emotion " presents itself only as a 
substitute for religious emotion, since nothing 
has been said about embodying it in worship. 
It comes to us commended by poetic quota- 
tions, and for common hearts stands in need 
of the commendation. Transfer of affection 
from an all-loving Father to an adamantine 
universe is a process which needs all the aid 
that the witchery of poetry can supply, 
though the poetry itself, for aught that we 
can see, must be ground out by the same 



MORALITY AND THEISM 239 

mill of evolution which grinds out virtue and 
affection. The symbols of cosmic emotion 
seem to be the feelings produced by the two 
objects of Kant's peculiar reverence, the 
starry heavens and the moral faculties of 
man. But, after all, what are these but 
aggregations of molecules in a certain stage 
of evolution? To be able to feel cosmic 
emotion, at all events, you must be sure that 
you have a cosmos. The phrase law is 
taken by science from theology, or from 
jurisprudence. Science can tell us nothing 
but phenomena accumulated by experience 
and methodized, which would not make a 
law, properly speaking, though they had been 
observed through myriads of years. In "cos- 
mos " also a theistic connotation seems to 
lurk, since order there could hardly be without 
an ordering power. 

Too little notice has been taken by moral 
philosophers of the different situations and 
circumstances of men. They write as though 
all men were capable of philosophy and free 
to follow its sublime advice. All men are 
capable of religion; all men can understand 



240 MORALITY AND THEISM 

the force of a divine command and the doc- 
trine of future reward or punishment; but it 
is vain to expect that a coal-heaver will 
appreciate Shaftesbury's delineation of the 
beauty of virtue like the persons of refine- 
ment to whom it was addressed, or be made 
to glow with cosmic emotion like Walt 
Whitman; and until the structure of society 
has been radically changed, coal-heavers, or 
multitudes as little philosophic or poetic, 
there will continue to be. We may begin 
to think that we have reestablished religion, 
when a practical impression, such as would 
exhibit itself in worship or something equiva- 
lent to it, has been made on common and 
uncultivated minds. 

If no divine command for the practice 
of virtue can be shown, if no assurance of 
the virtuous man's reward, such as Paley 
assumes, can be given, moral philosophy 
must, it would appear, be content simply 
to take the observation of human nature as 
its basis and to build its system on the 
natural desires of man, offering them such 
satisfaction as is consistent with the welfare 



MORALITY AND THEISM 241 

of the community and the race. We natu- 
rally desire health, and to be healthy means 
to be temperate and continent; we desire, 
for ourselves and our families, the means of 
living, and to obtain them we must be indus- 
trious, frugal, and of good repute; we desire 
domestic happiness, and to obtain it we must 
practise the domestic virtues; Ave desire the 
good-will of our fellow-men with the advan- 
tages which it brings, and to obtain it we 
must practise the virtues of good members of 
society and good citizens. There is no such 
thing as altruism in the literal sense of that 
term. Self is present in all we do, though 
the self is that of a being who desires love 
and fellowship as well as food and raiment; 
with which qualification the philosophy which 
has resolved morality into self-interest, 
though much decried, would be right enough. 
No man ever really acts against what he 
apprehends at the time to be his interest, 
though his interest may lead him to sacrifice 
his animal or individual to his domestic or 
social desires. 

The good which we do to others yields 



242 MORALITY AND THEISM 

US a deeper and more lasting satisfaction 
than the good which we do to ourselves. 
This is a pregnant fact and may seem to 
indicate the purpose of the author of our 
nature, if our nature has an author, and to 
promise a social consummation before the 
close. How far devotion to the interests of 
the race and heroic or philanthropic action 
will be affected by the departure of theistic 
belief will be seen when the kingdom of 
atheism or agnosticism has fully come. But 
it is not by such a figment as posthumous 
fame that the hearts of reasoning beings will 
be lifted above selfish desires. Nor is it 
likely that tribalism, however exalted or re- 
fined by nationality and patriotism, will act 
as it did on the Greek or Roman, in whom 
still lived, though in a sublimated form, the 
gregarious instinct of the herd. 

Intellectual effort, while it implies moral 
conditions, such as may dispose to labour and 
raise above sensual indulgence, has motive 
powers and attractions of its own apart 
from any which theism supplies. Yet we 
can hardly feel sure that there is not a 



MORALITY AND THEISM 243 

theistic element in the scientific conscience, 
which sacrifices not only ease and pleasure but 
sometimes reputation and everything else to 
the pursuit of truth. 

Whether this is, as Leibnitz thought, the 
best, or, as Schopenhauer thought, the worst, 
of all possible worlds, neither of them could 
really tell. Neither of them had any means 
of verifying his hypothesis by comparison or 
in any other way. Practically it is a very 
different world for different men. For the 
Roman emperor this was not the worst of all 
possible worlds; by the Roman slave it could 
hardly be deemed the best. Man's temporal 
estate is apparently capable of indefinite im- 
provement within the limits of mortality, 
though the improvement will not cancel the 
sufferings of the generations that are past. 

It takes, we are told, a period of time 
longer than man's recorded history for a 
ray of light to reach the earth from the 
remotest telescopic star. Yet the starry field 
swept by the telescope is inconceivably less 
than that which we must assume to lie 
beyond. In such a universe what is the life 



244 MORALITY AND THEISM 

of a man? Our little being is lost in 
immensity. This thought and that of the 
impenetrable mystery of existence are likely, 
rather than cosmic emotion, worship of hu- 
manity, or any of the other substitutes for 
theism, to take possession of the human mind 
if the belief in a God is withdrawn. 



THE END 



WORKS BY PROFESSOR GOLDWIN SMITH. 



THE UNITED STATES. 

An Outline of Political History, 1492-1 871. 

With Map. Crown 8vo. $2.00. 

" His survey of events is luminous, his estimate of character is singu- 
larly keen and just, and his style is at once incisive, dignified, and scholarly. 
. . . No one who takes up Mr. Goldwin Smith's volume will readily lay it 
down before he has finished it; no one will lay it down without acknowledg- 
ing the rare gifts of the writer." — The Times. 

" It is a literary masterpiece, as readable as a novel, remarkable for its 
compression without dryness, and its brilliancy without any rhetorical effort 
or display. What American could, with so broad a grasp and so perfect a 
style, have rehearsed our political history from Columbus to Grant in 300 
duodecimo pages of open type, or would have manifested greater candor in 
his judgment of men and events in a period of four centuries? It is enough 
to say that no one before Mr. Smith has attempted the feat, and that he has 
the field to himself." — TAe Nation. 



ESSAYS ON QUESTIONS OF THE 
DAY: 

POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 

By GOLDWIN SMITH, D.CL. 

NEW, REVISED, AND ENLARGED EDITION. 
i2mo. Cloth. $2.25. 

" These questions — for, as will be seen, there are many comprised under 
one head — are all treated in Professor Smith's latest volume with the clear- 
ness and force which belong to all his writings." — Critic. 

" The book is admirably concise in method, often epigrammatic in the 
sweeping generalizations. The method is modern, moreover, in that it takes 
account of social forms and prejudices, of popular thought, in short, as well 
as of the political plans of the few so-called leaders of men." 

— Hamlin Garland, in The Arena. 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY, 

66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW TORK. 



WORKS BY PROFESSOR GOLDWIN SMITH. 



CANADA AND THE CANADIAN 
QUESTION. 

With Map. Demy 8vo. Cloth. $2.00. 



THREE ENGLISH STATESMEN. 

A Course of Lectures on the Political History of England. 
i2mo. $1.50. 

Consents. — Pym; Cromwell; Pitt. 



A TRIP TO ENGLAND. 

New and Revised Edition. 
iSmo. Cloth, gilt top. 75 cents. 

"So delightful a cicerone as Mr. Goldwin Smith 
proves himself in * A Trip to England ' does not often 
fall to the lot of the non-personally conducted. . . . 
Meissonier-like in its diminutiveness, but also Meis- 
sonier-like in its mastery." — Critic. 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY, 

ee FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YOEK. 



WORKS BY PROFESSOR GOLDWIN SMITH. 



SPEQMENS OF GREEK TRAGEDY. 

2 vols. i6mo. Buckram, gilt top. $1.25 each. 

Vol. I., ^scHYLUs and Sophocles; Vol. II., Euripides. 



BAY LEAVES. 

Translations from the Latin Poets. 

i6mo. Buckram, gilt top. $1.25. 

" It has been given to but few to approach, and to none in our 
estimation to surpass, the delicate perception and the exquisite grace 
with which Professor Goldwin Smith has served up this glorious clas- 
sic feast with choicest English and in faultless style." — The Week. 



OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES 

A VIEW FROM RADCLIFFE LIBRARY. 
By GOLDWIN SMITH, D.C.L. 

With many full-page illustrations. 
i8mo. Cloth, gilt top. $1.50. 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY, 

ee FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK. 



69^ 








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